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What happens when you gut the liberal arts Finally: an explanation for how the United States of America could elect an under-educated, grandiose, narcissist reality TV star to the presidency. Social media (especially TikTok) is a digital Petri dish for breeding them. This TikTok freak show is completely nuts. The Wrap: The Guardian made the unusual move Wednesday to delete a 21-year-old letter written by Osama bin Laden from their site after several TikTokers urged followers to read the al Qaeda leader’s missive, causing “Letter to America” to go viral on the social media platform. Guardian readers are now met with the message, “This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the American people,’ as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.” In a statement to TheWrap, a spokesperson for the U.K. outlet said, “The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context.

Walmart’s Great Value Original Fruit Smiles is not exactly a new food, for the recipe has clearly been handed down through fluorescent generations. But given a recent update, they are truly the only fruit snack worth eating. The only fruit snack with substance, tang, and mouthfeel akin to banana flesh combined with a pencil eraser.

In a nondescript orange pouch, I did not believe they would be good. Especially given that they cost just $2.50 a box. But my son pressed a grape smile into his small, warm palm and shoved it through my clenched jaw as I briefly dozed on the sofa with an NFL game on. I involuntarily chewed and felt the snack adhere to my molars on the deepest level, the 70 percent daily value of vitamin C permeating every bone.

These smile-shaped gems are chewy and perfectly dense. Unlike some of these new fruit snacks that are soft, transparent, and aspic-like in texture. These generic babies take me back to recess in the rain, primary colors, and hitting yourself in the shin with a Skip-It on the playground. If you were alive in the 1980s, this is the fructose hit you’re looking for.

The door is wide open to hostile states seeking to meddle in the next election through AI-generated fake content

Spiritual guidance is rare in Vernon Lee’s stories. Her ghosts are usually the undoing of those who encounter them; they represent compulsive desires rather than fears, and the glamour of history more than the anxieties of modern life. Lee’s tales speak for those who are in love with the past. 

Byron took from Milton the idea that the mind, being ‘its own place and time’, could be its own hell. Torment in the tales and other ‘dark’ poems may be both a physical space – a dungeon, a set of chains – and a mental environment, built out of the dominant images within which Byron’s figures live.

The invitation​ said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’

If we loosen our grip on suffering, discard any claim to own it, then perhaps we can ask a different question: how much pain can anyone hold in their mind at once? Must my pain always be greater than yours for it to count?

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 23 (Friday 17 November 2023)

After nearly two decades of relative calm along the Lebanese-Israeli border, the Israeli defence minister is threatening to do to Beirut what he is doing to Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, has warned Israel that if it ever attacks Beirut again Hizbullah will start bombing Tel Aviv and beyond.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 23 (Friday 17 November 2023)

All agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, though there are many differences of opinion among lawyers as to the basis for this. What no one contests, however, is that serious violations of humanitarian law by your opponent do not give you licence to do the same to them.

Nowadays, if this prodigy of wickedness is remembered at all, it is for an Alma-Tadema painting showing the emperor smothering his guests in a shower of roses. Polite society no longer tolerates the Orientalist racism of the older accounts but, more prosaically, everyone now knows that these stories are nonsense.

For the 13th-century Muslim scholar Zakariyya al-Qazwini and his contemporaries, to contemplate the wonders of nature was to contemplate the majesty of God, so much so that cosmography was a mainstay of Islamic theology. But wonder was also an intellectual method. It acted as the initial stimulus for acquiring knowledge.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre.

it came, before the turn in the cherishedwind, what we called history, the turntowards, all of it more and moretowards – what is it that iscoming – must come – unfathomable,...

Historians should not have been asking whether Connolly abandoned socialism for Irish republicanism. Seeing the two as opposed is a fundamental misunderstanding: Connolly increasingly came to believe that national and socialist questions were synonymous in the case of Ireland.

Documentary has customarily been regarded as a genre duty-bound to deal in facts. But the only duty Herzog has ever felt as a filmmaker is, as he puts it, to ‘follow a grand vision’.

H.P.Lovecraft’s name rarely appears today without the requisite condemnation. Yet nobody is really suggesting that we stop reading him, cancel Cthulhu and de-platform the Great Old Ones.

So often Hals’s portrait subjects seem all too up for this charade, insufferably brash and loud. But it’s like any party: individuals are various, you hunt for those you get on with.

Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is interested in our relationship to the history we are living through, conscious that no one is fully aware of living in an historical epoch, perhaps as fictional figures can’t know they are in a story.

“The new Supreme Court ethics code released on Monday looks good on paper, experts in legal ethics said. But only on paper. Its lack of an enforcement mechanism means that it will operate on the honor system, with individual justices deciding for themselves whether their conduct complies with the code.” — New York Times, 11/14/23

Fellow justices, now that we’ve adopted a “new” “ethics” “code,” you may be wondering about compliance. Accordingly, I have composed the following series of scenarios based on past conversations I have had with you. Please note that recusal is still up to you, and there are still no penalties for failure to disclose anything. So, while the below should be taken as strict guidance, you should also be aware, just among us, that you can still do pretty much whatever the hell you want.

Since the 7 October attacks, it has become common for politicians and commentators, whatever their political orientation, to behave as if mourning is a limited commodity. The logic according to which a march for peace can’t exist alongside a remembrance ceremony is also a logic that rejects our capacity to mourn the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike.

Any civilian government that wants to unify Myanmar society will face a conundrum: how to deal with the crimes committed by its own side without turning the groups that have joined together to fight the junta against one another. 

The BBC released stills from the Doctor Who remaster of "The Daleks" in colour and wow, the floors are blue. Like... really, really BLUE!

The Lever speaks with cryptocurrency critic Molly White about the criminal trial of former cryptocurrency titan Sam Bankman-Fried.