Reading

Created
Thu, 06/02/2025 - 01:00
Depending on the breaks A bit over six months ago, President Biden’s June 27 debate with Donald Trump went badly for him. Embarrassingly badly. He looked old, frail. He lost his train of thought. How long had his staff been covering for him? Everyone wanted to know. It was its own mini scandal and led to Biden dropping out of the race a few weeks later. The country elected Donald Trump instead in November. Then Trump on Tuesday declared in a press conference that the United States would ethnically cleanse 1.8 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, take “a long-term ownership position” there, and develop the beachfront into a series of Trump-branded resorts. (Trump’s ownership stake was implied.) “Everybody I’ve spoken to [inside his demented head] loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land” and developing it, Trump told a roomful of reporters. It would create thousands of new jobs and be “magnificent,” Trump continued.
Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 23:59

Dear Old Man Who Bartered with My Cancer-Patient Daughter at the Community Yard Sale Fundraiser,

Thank you for attending the Alex’s Lemonade Stand community yard sale last Saturday. By “attending,” of course, I mean “looming over my ten-year-old daughter’s card table and haggling over the price of a sequined stuffed seal as if your Social Security payments depended on it.”

I imagine you saw the sign: ALL PROCEEDS DONATED TO CHARITY. The one my daughter painted with her one good hand while still hooked to a chemo pump like she’s the saddest science experiment ever.

Or maybe you noticed the giant cardboard cutout of her: bald head gleaming and feeding tube affixed to her nose like a fashion accessory from the Underworld’s spring/summer collection. The only thing better than having cancer is reminding the whole goddamn neighborhood about it with oversized props.

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Of the principles and themes outlined in this issue, Tribune readers will easily discern. ‘Gastropolitics’ discusses how food matters to socialist politics. Food institutions historic, existing or imagined, are discussed, as well as the transformative urges behind their establishment. Coverage is given to the acceleration of climate catastrophe, where ever-growing prices and the cartelisation of […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

It’s far better to show up at a picket line with cake than a newspaper to sell. Donations of food and drink are usually welcome gestures of solidarity during an industrial dispute; in drawn-out struggles, they become essential. Feeding a strike is often unspectacular, hidden work, which deserves greater recognition. It’s not all tales of […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

One afternoon in April 2022, Josh Saltzman, the owner of a sports bar in Washington DC, opened his inbox to find what looked like a french fry price-fixing conspiracy. Saltzman had received a notice from his bar’s food distributor that effective 4 April, the four major suppliers of frozen potato products, which sell products like […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

In the centre of the Polish capital, Warsaw, is a street called Nowy Swiat — New World Street. Built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in a neoclassical style and reconstructed very meticulously to something like its original appearance after Warsaw’s near-total destruction by Nazi Germany in 1944, it is the very heart of bourgeois […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Faint murmurings of renewal are stirring the still reservoirs of hope on Labour’s fragmented left. Talk of a new party is spreading — again. The mood — let’s stay realistic — is evident in discrete sectors of the party membership, among disenchanted MPs, in the diaspora of expelled or disaffected members, and in several Labour movement grouplets, at […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

‘I suppose it’s better the devil you know,’ says Michael,* a food production worker from Spalding, Lincolnshire. He has worked for the food manufacturing company Bakkavor, which has been providing fresh food products to supermarkets like Tesco, M&S, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose for around two and a half decades. ‘We used to get double time or […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Bad news for coffee lovers: you’re going to be paying more for your morning brew in 2025. Brazil and Vietnam are the world’s largest coffee producers, and both are forecasting lower production volumes this year. Brazil, which is the world’s largest producer of Arabica coffee, experienced the worst drought in seventy years in 2024. Drier […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene, the deadliest to hit mainland USA since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, struck the Big Bend region of Florida. The damage inflicted by natural disasters in the US is sometimes reported in terms of ‘insured losses’, which in this case ran into the tens of billions, but the human cost […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

In his mid-nineteenth-century prose poem Crowds, the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire declared that it ‘is not given to everyone to take a bath among the multitude’. More than this, he elaborated in the same poem: [E]njoying the crowd is an art; and he only can make, at the expense of the human race, a lively […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Can the Western museum be decolonised? This is the question posed by Françoise Vergès in A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum, which takes its name from French Afro-Caribbean Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon’s invocation of anti-colonial practice in his influential 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. In her book, first published in France […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

Nothing in the Gay Hussar’s long life was quite like the leaving of it. There we were, the bedraggled survivors of many a long lunch/dinner/afternoon under the table, some of us from the departing rear guard unit, the ‘Goulash Co-operative’, set up to save the famous restaurant from closure or, worse, being turned into some […]

Created
Wed, 05/02/2025 - 22:00

In All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, the sociologist Stephen Mennell disseminated the determination of good taste. Describing the opacity by which culinary class is arrived at, from established tourist manuals to Michelin guides, Mennell describes how judgements are created without engagement or […]