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China is eschewing the former European Central Bank chief’s pledge to ‘do whatever it takes’ to stabilise via monetary easing. For weeks now, global markets have ricocheted between excitement over a Chinese stimulus boom and disappointment that Beijing was taking its sweet time to jolt a slowing economy. It’s now clear that Xi Jinping’s team Continue reading »

At the time of the 2022 survey, 60.5 percent of our staff identified as white and 35 percent identified as people of color.

The post The Intercept’s 2022 Annual Staff Demographic Survey appeared first on The Intercept.

He sounds a little uhm — over-stimulated to me. Meanwhile, one of the most right wing members of congress doesn’t care for this idea that slavery was actually beneficial for the enslaved: And …. DeSantis, of course, goes after Donalds: Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. affirmed to superintendents Wednesday afternoon that the standards will be approved in their current form. Responding to Donalds, Diaz slammed the congressman as “supposedly conservative” and part of the federal government trying to “dictate Florida’s education standards.” “This new curriculum is based on truth,” he said. “We will not back down from teaching our nation’s true history at the behest of a woke @WhiteHouse, nor at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman.” Jeremy Redfern, the press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis, also called Donalds a “supposed conservative.” “Supposed conservatives in the federal government are pushing the same false narrative that originated from the @WhiteHouse,” Redfern said.

We realize there are a lot of educational toys out there, particularly those that teach STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, and math). In today’s crowded marketplace, it can be tough to know what will keep your children entertained and on track to become the next engineer, chemist, coder, or tech CEO.

But what if they want to grow up to be a writer, artist, lawyer, therapist, or—dear god—a teacher? Not on our watch. Our new line of toys will keep your little Musks from falling into the hands of Big History and Social Work.

As I write this, CNN is reporting that Trump’s lawyers are meeting with the Special Counsel today as the Grand Jury has convened in DC. Buckle up. Meanwhile, here’s Trump caterwauling last night. It would appear he knew …. something: Lol! “We’ll have fun on the stand with all of these people that say the Presidential Election wasn’t Rigged and Stollen. THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY!!!” he declared, spelling “stolen” as he often does, as “stollen,” which is actually a popular German Christmastime dessert.

“To serve Man,” indeed “The Beat with Ari Melber” on Wednesday featured a segment in which astrophysicist Adam Frank offered skeptical commentary on the congressional UFO/UAP hearings. In her wrap-up, MSNBC’s Katie Phang quipped that she got her information on aliens from a “documentary” called Independence Day. I like a good movie about aliens as much as the next person, but they are movies. The Twitter/Xitter/whatever comments on the hearings were withering. Most ran along the lines of, “So aliens travel here possibly from hundreds of light years away only to crash? Repeatedly?” Perhaps what we need more than a congressional hearing on UFOs/UAPs is one on the credulity pandemic.

Historical narratives have long associated Britain and France with the liberal march of progress, but in this distinctively Southern European context these countries stood for military occupation, self-interested imperialism and – in the 1820s – constitutional conservatism.

Deciding what to show at Wiels, Chaimowicz wrote to the curator, Zoë Gray: ‘I would like to send you my sitting room.’ The result is a theatrical approximation of The Hayes Court Sitting Room, an exploded view of the dandy’s self-enclosing urge to make a world against the world.

Readers have thought that Waugh’s books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious. There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s, and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited.

With her insistence on renegotiating power dynamics between the sexes, claiming her right to sexual pleasure, and earning her own money, Alysoun can sound not unlike a second-wave feminist. Yet she doesn’t fit neatly into any ideology. The first word she speaks in the Canterbury Tales is ‘experience’, and it is her specific experience of marriage that gives her authority.

Han Kang’s story is propelled by antinomies. Here is a dead language, Greek, and there is the ‘unbearably alive’ Korean. Here is a philosopher, there a poet; one unrequited love, another love one cannot requite; a deaf woman who reads lips and a mute woman who writes with her fingertips. It feels geometrical: closer to Euclid’s Elements than to Plato’s Republic.

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For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world around him; he paints not from life but from photographs, when the subject is settled and the angle already determined. In some ways, however, he shares Mark Fisher’s pessimism.

Like all these early, insect-calling flowers, the smell held some intimation of meat and rot, despite which it was intoxicating. Some dull part of my brain had been woken by the realisation that I was alive, a fact that was constantly announcing itself, I am alive I am alive.

One of Labour’s least attractive peculiarities is how restless it gets when deprived of opportunities for self-flagellation. It could have greeted last Thursday’s by-election results simply by stressing the obvious – that the country is repulsed by the Conservatives, for whom these elections were a disaster. Instead the party has erupted in hopeless overreaction.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 16 (Friday 28 July 2023)

The mood in Kyiv is mixed. The war is not over, but it has receded. People are beginning to think about how it might end, and what kind of Ukraine might come afterwards. What will happen when the soldiers come home? 

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 16 (Friday 28 July 2023)

Fiction can do without all sorts of things that seemed essential to 19th-century novelists: it doesn’t need to comment on society, or provide descriptions of settings and scenery, or a linear chronology, or a fixed point of view. So why are characters so stubborn?

Diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task is not statecraft but the promotion of their country’s ‘interests’ – reducible to the arms industry and a few other national giants. What would Unilever do? Did his excellency bring the brochure? The diplomat: an honest person sent to hawk stuff abroad for the good of his country.  

Richard Mosse seeks what can’t be seen. He employs military or industrial camera technologies sensitive to light spectra invisible to the eye; his subjects are ignored or remote catastrophes.

In​ the middle of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other problems is that it doesn’t change enough. But we understand the horror.

Ian Fleming once said that ‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know.’ But it’s just as true that Sidney Reilly wasn’t James Bond: in Fleming’s novels (and even more in the films based on them), 007’s individual actions make all the difference.