A modern economy is a very complicated system. Since we cannot conduct controlled experiments on its smaller parts, or even observe them in isolation, the classical hard-science devices for discriminating between competing hypotheses are closed to us. The main alternative device is the statistical analysis of historical time-series. But then another difficulty arises. The competing […]
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In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not... Read more
Itmar Ben-Gvir perceives all Palestinians in the West Bank as potential terrorists, the same way that Israel’s ‘moderate’ President Isaac Herzog perceives all Gazans as “responsible” for Hamas’ actions.
The post Israel’s Ben-Gvir Sees West Bank Opportunity in Gaza Genocide appeared first on MintPress News.
Some illiteration about the mad king U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan adjourned E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against Donald “91 Counts” Trump in New York City on Monday after one of the jurors became sick. Trump himself is expected to take the stand this afternoon. The mad king was using his thumbs about it again last night. If Trump’s Truth Social account is any indication of his state of mind, hoo-boy (The New Republic): Trump made 42 posts about Carroll (and one pushing falsehoods about the House January 6 investigative committee) on Truth Social in the span of 13 minutes. Many of his posts included photos or clips of interviews that he has previously shared about Carroll. Trump’s posting rate is so fast that the former president must have some prescheduled, some drafts saved for constant reuse, someone else posting for him, or some combination of all three. His Truth Social account shared media interview clips and social media posts that appear to come from Carroll, all stripped of context so as to paint her as some sort of sexual deviant.
As fake grassroots organisations continue their culture war – we need to fight back, writes Otto English
You can’t own what he shows. Clouds are common property. Phenomena such as sunsets and moonrises suspend distinctions anyway. So much in him is planetary as much as local. There are no frontiers, no inspectors, no languages. You couldn’t talk to him on days he was painting clouds, his wife said.
The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic remains. At its best, watching a game of snooker is like watching a kind of exquisitely delayed explosion.
Johnson’s HouseThe hopeless, who hadNowhere else to go, he packedInto his house. SoLoneliness took onThe look of home, duty grewUseful, like tea-cups.TrialsThey go like lightningOver jumps,...
The gruelling, often grotesque nature of the Italian campaign is reason enough to remember it, but it’s been overlooked, idly regarded as filler between the defeat of Rommel and the Normandy Landings.
Populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the US Capitol. Everything is now political, and society increasingly resembles a ‘permanent Dreyfus Affair’.
In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build a life that is illegible to her.
I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right.
Moving the Sanskrit epics ‘from mythology to history’ turns out to mean the obliteration of an archaeological site by a construction site. This is the kind of historical reckoning which India’s present government endorses.
Democracy means sharing space with people whom we find annoying, and who sometimes deliberately annoy us. But like it or not, we have to have the right to get in each other’s faces.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 3 (Friday 26 January 2024)
There’s no boredom in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and no pulse of adrenaline either. To be in orbit, after all, is to be held in a balance of forces. Any acceleration would nudge things out of kilter.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 3 (Friday 26 January 2024)
Alasdair MacIntyre drew a conclusion he has stuck to ever since: that philosophy takes time. Instead of choosing an opinion that appeals to you and forsaking all others, you need to take on different arguments and give them time to sort themselves out.
Dear Ambitious Real Estate Agent,
It was the leggings, wasn’t it? I didn’t plan on buying them, but my daughter’s best friend’s mom was hosting a pop-up shopping party, and I found myself powerless to resist those six peppy syllables. All the other moms were telling me they felt like butter, a sensation I had not considered possible or desirable in a pair of pants. Have you ever tried to rinse butter off your fingers?
I was going to pick the least offensive one—solid army green—but this was a “party.” Fuck it. For eighteen dollars, I parted the racks and reached for the most garish pattern. I planned to tone it down with a chunky, oversized black turtleneck sweater and add Doc Martens for a subtle punk vibe.
But I didn’t.
The spacesbetweenthings beganspeaking. So it wasI understood Iwas nowto remainsilent. Saw howwe were allplungedinto this new strengtheningsilence. Was itvision was itcatastrophe. Thisfirst personI...
Israeli tactics have little in common with standard counterinsurgency doctrine or rules of engagement. The war on Gaza is at its core retributive: an act of collective punishment. Like all punishment, to ask whether or not it ‘works’ misses the point that punishment is often an end in itself.
I have spent 25 years working as a criminal defence lawyer and have yet to find anyone who knows of a single police officer being convicted for their role in a wrongful conviction.
The Sumerian priestess Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father, Sargon of Akkad, did with axes and spears: to unify the resistant cities of the new empire into a coherent whole.
By the 1950s Scandinavian design principles dominated British architecture schools, and were taken to be the natural model for the new towns, new housing estates and new universities. The frustrated young Brutalist James Stirling, for whom all this was frippery and cowardice, declared: ‘Let’s face it, William Morris was a Swede.’