For some, it’s a genuine community: a safe haven of soothers and tingle-seekers, a tool for anxiety relief and relaxation, amateur in style but extremely lucrative for independent self-described ASMRtists. For others, it’s a strange and unappealing fetish: a cynical form of ‘digital intimacy’. It’s the best, or the worst, the internet has to offer.
Reading
We can’t bear to come from nothing. We come from the dead, from our dead, in whatever mysterious ways we imagine that bond. Genealogy is a form of communion with those we take to be ancestors.
Which archival sources are used and whose voices are silenced? The Marcoses have – for now – claimed the archive and seized the narrative. They tell the story of a golden age followed by a fall and a quest for redemption. In the Philippines, a deeply Catholic country, the story has a satisfying narrative arc.
It isn’t just that the story of the Enlightenment needs amending to reflect its true complexity, it’s that conventional approaches to global history are in need of profound recalibration. The Malagasy weren’t just the backwater hosts of pirate kingdoms, imaginary or otherwise: they had busied themselves with their own political experiments.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 7 (Friday 17 March 2023)
A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental movie, and Kang-ho won the Best Actor award at Cannes for that tender look and others like it. But ‘sentimental’ doesn’t seem quite the right designation, since the man himself steals and sells children.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 7 (Friday 17 March 2023)
Ships are abandoned when their owners take on too much debt, or when they deliberately let the ship’s condition and licences slip, or when they fail to pay the crew’s wages. If they leave the ship, crew members lose the right to claim their wages, and in some jurisdictions they may be threatened with arrest for negligence.
Corruption is ‘endemic in policing across the world’, the 2021 report into Daniel Morgan’s murder states. It takes root, efforts are made to tackle it, then attention moves elsewhere and it takes root again.
Something which has slipped past most people’s radar is that China recently acted as the intermediary for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for decades, funding and running operations and proxies against each other. Elijah Manjier has a decent summary (part is behind a subscriber wall) from a pro-Iranian point of view.
It’s also interesting that in this conference no English was used!
Now it’s obvious why the US couldn’t be involved: it hates Iran and doesn’t intend to change that any time soon. But that China was reached out to indicates that it has good relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia and that it’s considered powerful and prestigious enough to be involved a region far from its core.
A guide for ORG supporters and activists who want to take action to protect their digital rights from the Online Safety Bill Campaign Pack on the Online Safety Bill for ORG campaignersAuthor – James Baker – james.baker@openrightsgroup.orgMarch 2023 – V1CC BY-SA 3.0
Studies have found that alphabet books are helpful and fun tools to promote literacy and teach life lessons to children. But studies also show that kids’ lives are ridiculously easy. They don’t have to pay rent or run errands or wonder whether it’s time to start thinking about freezing their eggs. Adults, on the other hand, are faced with all kinds of unwritten rules every day—and we need to have them spelled out. Literally. Here are twenty-six experiences that define being twenty-six and beyond.
A is for Adulthood, its trials and tribulations…
B is for the Babysitter—whose rates outpace inflation.
C is for Cups covering your nightstand and desk…
D is for the rush you’ll get Depositing mobile checks.
E is for Escaping your home friend’s MLM biz…
F is for FICO score, whatever that is.
G is for Grocery shopping—AGAIN—for moldy berries…
H is for HBO to cure the Sunday scaries.
Startups are on pins and needles.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SNL, AEW, The Blacklist, Monk, The Boys, Star Trek: SNW, Gunn/Superman/Batman, Daredevil, Doctor Who & more!
Advocacy groups and human rights organisations have written to the Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, and the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Stephen Watson, to ask them to investigate discriminatory police practices in the wake of the conviction of ten young Black men, known as the Manchester 10. Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy BurnhamGreater Manchester Combined […]
In this week’s Lever Time episode, we explore the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and its impact on the financial system.
Michael Hudson gives a wide-ranging talk on SVB and other recent bank collapses, focusing on the considerable role of misguided Fed policies
Iain Barbour first noticed something was wrong when he started choking on a burger. ‘I realised I couldn’t swallow. And I had these chest pains that I thought was a heart attack,’ he recalls. When he went to the doctor in July 2020, he was told it was acid reflux. After weeks with no progress […]
- by Aeon Video
- by Mario Saraceni
The Currency of Politics - audiobook
The neoliberal approach to money is that it is apolitical, facilitating exchange without interfering in it. But with the bailouts of 2008 and then COVID, more people understand that money does not work by itself, but must be managed through the political process.
"Fool me once, shame on thee. Fool me twice, shame on me." The Global Soutn has wised up in the wake of the war in Iraq.