Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking — it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras. Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them. Under the buzzword “modernization,” the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in... Read more
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Republicans want their new weapon With the 2022 Dobbs decision abolishing womens’s federal right to an abortion, Republicans lost a campaign issue they’d campaigned on reliably for decades. It was like the Pentagon’s identity crisis after the Cold War ended. The Pentagon spent the 1990s not knowing who it should be planning to fight. Republicans have failed again and again since 2022 to block abortion protection amendments in the states, even as fringe right legislators all but lock women with doomed pregnancies into iron maidens as they bleed out. Abortion is on its way to being a third rail in Republican politics. The issue is now a political loser. To replace abortion, the GOP settled on Great Replacement theory, an isotopic variant of the Southern Strategy. Republicans stoke fears of brown-skinned hordes of immigrants pouring across the U.S. southern border to knock white Americans off the top of the social ladder. It’s not about race as much as power and status. Race is just the icing. Speaking with Sen.
Just one day after Suella Braverman's appeal for more stringent protest restrictions, the UK Government has unveiled a new set of anti-protest laws.
A Muslim Met staffer resigned saying her complaints about racism, misogyny and sexual assault allegedly committed by her colleagues had been systematically ignored
The intermittence of Western arms money is not the Ukrainian military’s only problem as it organises to do three things: hold Russia at bay this year, push it back in the medium term, and create an impregnable defence for an indefinite future truce. Alongside the lack of money to fund weapons is the lack of weapons to buy.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 4 (Friday 09 February 2024)
Trump’s misdeeds have been amply documented through two impeachment proceedings, extensive congressional investigations, Mueller’s final report and endless news coverage. Perhaps the liberal principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is at work. If so, it is having distinctly illiberal effects.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 4 (Friday 09 February 2024)
A version of ‘Solo de lune’ by Jules LaforgueI smoke, spread outBeneath the evening sky on the top deckOf a careering stagecoach, every boneIn my body rattling, jangling – but my...
12 a.m. This is not working out as planned.
12:01 a.m. You toss aside earlier goals; the new goal is to wind this thing up as soon as possible or at least by daybreak.
12:05 a.m. You put on your go-to attire: comfortable and able to absorb sweat and other bodily fluids.
12:30 a.m. It’d be easier to focus if the space around you wasn’t so cluttered.
1 a.m. Prep books you don’t have the energy to read needle you.
1:10 a.m. A little bit of alcohol wouldn’t go amiss, but you don’t dare.
3 a.m. If only you could get some sleep, this might actually come together.
3:15 a.m. Bleary-eyed and desperate, you call your mother. She doesn’t answer.
3:20 a.m. The support group you joined doesn’t respond to your texts; it’s just you and your endurance.
3:30 a.m. You swig down an extra-large tea or coffee; you can’t tell the difference anymore.
3:45 a.m. Uh-oh, you don’t have time to go to the bathroom.
A work of art is what it is, even more than what it says. The only real way of seeing how Hamlet differs from Henry is to perceive the great difference in the plays that hold them, a mature tragedy and an early history.
What was this Society for which Pope Paul III provided a charter? It was not a religious order, though it is often styled as such. Its members were neither monks nor friars. Its self-descriptor as a Societas aligned it with the ‘companies’ or devotional confraternities of priests and laity in late medieval Italy.
Maritime insurance companies have increased the war risk premium on ships travelling through the Red Sea from $10,000 for a $100 million cargo ship in early September to $1 million by mid-January. The volume of cargo passing through the Suez Canal has fallen by 45 per cent.
Artificial life could be both mechanical and magical. The term ‘automaton’, referring to a self-moving machine, was first used in Europe in 1531 in a catalogue of magic, De Occulta Philosophia. Automata are listed as a type of ‘celestial magic’, a category which includes maths, music, astronomy and mechanics.
Despite the mistakes, video assistant refereeing works. A 2020 study showed that overall decision accuracy improved with the use of VAR from an already high 92.1 per cent to 98.3 per cent. So what’s all the fuss about? Part of the problem is that although the right decisions are being reached more often, it doesn’t feel like they are.
In its modern incarnations, sport is a spontaneous thing, blowing wherever the fans fancy. Even the impulses that have transformed Britain into a nation of joggers and gym bunnies remain mysterious. They certainly do not spring from any Department of National Fitness.
Alex Comfort became best known for The Joy of Sex (1972). This annoyed him. It was his 31st book. As well as a sexologist, he was a poet, novelist, doctor, biologist, gerontologist, anarchist, scientific humanist, public intellectual, and activist in the pacifist and anti-nuclear movements. Even as a child, Comfort was a polymath.
Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for the press on record. The IWM may have arrived at the conclusion that the journalist is a crucial figure for understanding conflict, but only some journalists are afforded that status in the field. Others are regarded as targets.
Linnaeus’s personal contradictions do not make him a historical chimera. If he sounds odd to those who hold a view of Enlightenment science as rational and orderly, perhaps that’s because real Enlightenment science was a great deal weirder than that.
The peculiarities of the British constitution mean that it requires the combined input of the disciplines of law, politics and history – each with its own priorities, sensitivities and hinterlands of learning – to make sense of its practices. But the field has been vacated by most historians.
It’s not that the locals are in denial about what is going on in the camp. Everyone seems to have incorporated the horrors as real but ignorable aspects of regular existence. Höss and Hedwig not only tolerate Auschwitz. It fails to touch their happiness in any way.
Devotees often exult in the stripping of her beauty and her wealth; she is imagined as a woman of substance, who owned property in Magdala (hence her name), and when she repents and gives all this up, her reduction becomes the source of great satisfaction to the worthy men who love her in spite of – or because of – their general suspicion of and contempt for women.
The Manningtree Witches and The Glutton are both driven by an appetite for the ‘juiciest’ words – for ‘how they feel when you say them, or look at them’. But if a writer seems more invested in verbal effects than in what she is communicating, disillusionment sets in. I came to doubt that Blakemore was focused on what she was telling me.
For Hegel, the actual contains the possible, so that you can plunge into it with no fear of losing sight of a desirable alternative. You don’t need to tack some arbitrary utopian dimension onto what exists, since what exists already secretes within itself the seeds of what ought to be.