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Net neutrality to sunset if Retained EU Law Bill is passed Retained Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill will wipe out net neutrality from UK law on 31 December this year. Anyone who cares about the Internet – and indeed who cares about freedom of expression and access to information online – should be […]
This Afterlife is A. E. Stallings’s new Selected Poems, drawing on her four full-length books, and including a “lagniappe” or bonus of previously uncollected poems and translations. Stallings, a poet who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, has made Athens, Greece, her home for almost two decades. Her education in Classics, Latin, and Greek prepared her for a life preoccupied with the Grecian peninsula, but the move was not preordained—it’s rather as if her work over the years led her there, from her debut collection Archaic Smile, a book of rewritings of myths and riffs on sayings, her second book Hapax, her translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and George Seferis, on through her third book, Olives, and her fourth, the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Like, which begins with an epigraph in Greek and a poem that responds to it. That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a poet whose strongest work often emerges out of inherited forms, and that her sensibility was European before she herself knew it was—the poem recalls that journey in the slow boil of the villanelle, building, and recasting:
And he is the rest of us Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement. There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.” The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding. Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic): According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent.
The cartoonist HT Webster predicting generative art in 1923
The art of biography appears to the prince to be a pane of clear glass through which the truth will finally be revealed to the reader. Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 3 (Thursday 19 January 2023)
The postwar welfare state, with its implicit recognition of human need, produced public domains and clinical spaces in which the state was cast as maternal surrogate to a population of child citizens. If Nazism had demonstrated the triumph of the superego’s capacity to punish, with ‘Hitler daddy’ as the authoritarian father, only a maternal approach could avert future catastrophe.
If it is the job of a poet to cast spells, H.D. was very good at it. She was a master of the striking launch, the bravura speech act, sustained intensity. Her work can seem like a high-wire performance, a hierophantic authority balancing over the abyss of kitsch; what’s amazing is how often she pulls it off.
If political advantage were the only consideration, you would expect the government to quickly settle disputes where the strikers have public support. A poll at the end of last year suggested that 66 per cent of people support striking nurses, with only 28 per cent opposed. That the government hasn’t come to an agreement with the Royal College of Nursing suggests either that they are poor tacticians, or that they are unwilling to countenance tax rises, no matter the cost to public services.
Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years between his appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and his early death in 1902, he became the face of a quintessentially modern – because newly global – form of religiosity.
If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously faked, but to what end? Who wants this Tate Modern for philistines, this Senate House for illiterates, this Berghain for people who can’t dance?
Russell Banks admitted that he wrote about the sort of people who voted for Trump; those were the people he came from. He wanted them to understand themselves better. But that didn’t mean he was an optimist. The real-life story of Sadie Marchant had a happy ending insofar as the Shakers were vindicated. Banks’s story is different.
Samuel Adams was an ascetic, indifferent to worldly baubles, decent comforts, respectable clothing. His republican vision for Massachusetts was forbiddingly austere, not an open marketplace free of intrusive British taxation, but what he termed, uninvitingly, a ‘Christian Sparta’. Religion was not then a private matter of belief unrelated to political attitudes.
Holding a coin that someone else held two thousand years ago creates a special feeling of connectedness. Anyone who has handed a bag of cheap Roman bronzes around a room of bored undergraduates will have seen first-hand the way it electrifies the atmosphere. Coins make history feel real. And there are an awful lot of them out there.
In ancient Egyptian culture, images and words were in a state of constant oscillation between letters, sounds and things. Hieroglyphic letters require as much typographical standardisation as the letters of any alphabet in order to be read. What makes a beautiful image of an owl into a beautiful calligraphic letter M is rigorous formal regularisation; a perched bird turning its gaze directly towards you 𓅓.
Russia is fighting Ukraine about borders. This means that, as well as dodging bombs and getting used to living in the dark, residents of the border zone have to decide if they are ‘really’ Russian or ‘really’ Ukrainian. Some will no doubt be keeping the non-chosen identity in a trunk in the attic, to be retrieved in case of future need. But the logic of war is stern: those who choose to be Ukrainians are also opting to hate Russians as the enemy invader, while those in Ukraine who choose to be Russians are contemplating the possibility of having to move east.
Isaac Deutscher’s contributions to Workers’ Fight in 1940 fall short of an unambiguous rejection of revolutionary defeatism; it is possible that Tamara Deutscher altered her husband’s words, but without the original tape recording it’s hard to know for sure. What is clear, though, is that he couldn’t accept the social patriotism of the Labour Party and most people on the left: ‘This was just too trivial to me, too conventional and too obviously based on the normal bourgeois democratic assumptions and premises of their policies.’
after the hard seedspushed in as deep aspossible & kept alive on dew
The characters in Ned Beauman’s book are defined by the extent to which they care about animals. Halyard doesn’t unless they’re going to make him money or send him to jail. Resaint empathises too much. But does Beauman think we should care about animals?
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mali was the poster child of democratisation in Africa. It is now seen as the West’s biggest disappointment on the continent. It has experienced three coups in a decade and was more or less ungovernable in the intervening years. Today, it is ruled by a military junta that persecutes political opponents, derides the West and has Vladimir Putin as a patron. But just as the West’s lionisation of Malian democracy was excessive, its current disenchantment might be too.
1. Snide comment.
2. Snidier comment about other’s political party affiliation.
3. Snidiest comment unwittingly based on an Instagram meme about a certain political party.
4. Retort based unwittingly on another Facebook meme created as a response to the first.
5. Sweeping unassailable generalization.
6. Righteous indignation.
7. Fact.
8. Conspiracy theory.
9. More facts.
10. More conspiracy theories.
11. Conspiracy theory.
12. Counter–conspiracy theory.
13. Fact?
14. Fact?
15. Snide slogan masquerading as fact about issue not directly related but rather inferred from stance of preceding discourse.
16. Snidier slogan masquerading as fact about yet another inferred issue.
17. Didactic speech about the importance of using reason, facts, and research rather than snide slogans and didactic speeches.
18. “Research.”
19. Question veracity of sources.
20. Question the word “veracity.”
21. Question mental fortitude.
22. Righteous indignation.
23. Massive unfalsifiable statement.
Markets were, as Friedrich Hayek put it with uncharacteristic exuberance, a ‘marvel’, co-ordinating economic decisions in ‘a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand’. They are, you might say, a device for pooling our ignorance. This way of looking at markets may not have been revolutionary, but it was genuinely illuminating, and Hayek would describe it as the only ‘discovery’ he had ever made, hoping it had finally disposed of that ‘skeleton in our cupboard’ – the fiction of ‘economic man’.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 3 (Thursday 19 January 2023)
The movie wears well, and is certainly better than I remembered, but time has also made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare than it used to be or was probably meant to be. Or closer to a certain Shakespeare, the one who loves terrible jokes and cheerfully allows them to accompany violence and distress.