Reading

Wagner didn’t just support Russia’s military, it became an integral part of the fighting force.

The post Prigozhin’s Legacy Is the Global Rise of Private Armies for Hire appeared first on The Intercept.

Controlling people’s bodies requires trashing representative government and violating every individual right.

The post Abortion Bans or Democracy — You Can’t Have Both appeared first on The Intercept.

They are trying to kill their own children.

This one’s been off my radar The insurrectionist-in-chief plans to proudly turn himself in today for booking in Atlanta. Donald Trump, the ever-blustery showman and former president, has scheduled the media circus in primetime for maximum television ratings. Receiving less coverage is the multi-state plot to access voting software included in Fulton County District Attorney Fanu Willis’ indictment. Ben Clements and Susan Greenhalgh take up the story for Slate. “There have been multiple accounts of Trump supporters unlawfully accessing voting systems to copy proprietary vote-recording and vote-counting software in Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These reports spurred criminal investigations in their respective states, but until Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed charges last week, none of these probes had tied the crimes back to Trump’s coordinated, multipronged plot to stay in power,” the pair explain. Willis includes the software heist in her racketeering indictment.

Although Adam Elsheimer provided miniatures for private and privileged delectation, his work enjoyed an enormous influence, partly because of his close association with a great engraver, Hendrick Goudt, but also because his inventions possess a certain monumentality and indeed often grow larger in recollection. 

Macaulay seems to have belonged to what revisionist historians now refer to as the Christian Enlightenment, a movement that stood apart from the more familiar Enlightenment of sceptical or deistic philosophes. The term ‘enlightened’ is used approvingly in Macaulay’s writings, but her radicalism – so daringly evident in political questions – did not extend to matters of religious belief.

In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan’s first book, the choice presented to bisexual women – surrender to the world’s expectations and get with a man, or follow your desires and risk forfeiting power and ‘normality’ – is the central moral issue. There is never any real doubt that the protagonist, Ava, will eventually choose to ignore the world’s expectations. In The Happy Couple there’s more suspense, and more confusion.

The sheer force of the memories exacted an impressive precision and solidity in Coleman’s expression. And she must have felt the electricity of her novel, as she was writing it, in both directions: channelling the truth of an extraordinary experience, and at the same time satisfying a radical modernist aesthetic, turning the sane world upside down and making out of her ‘madness’ a new literature.

‘What do you do?’ a midwife asked as she helped me to the bathroom. We were in the postnatal ward for people who have had a bad time of it. ‘I’m a historian of ... all this,’ I answered, and gestured vaguely at the wreckage of the ward. Two and a half years on, I can say, expertly, continently: between the 16th and the 18th century, midwifery was transformed.

The good cop, bad cop routine of the digital age.

Ulysses is haunted by the story of its own composition. As Joyce famously put it, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ The annotators point out, however, that it is ‘very likely that Joyce never said this’.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 17 (Friday 25 August 2023)

Only the Greek junta in 1969 and Russia last year have left the European Convention on Human Rights – Russia went shortly before it was to be expelled for invading Ukraine. No democratic country has sought to do so.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 17 (Friday 25 August 2023)

J.L. Austin was fascinated by many details of language for their own sake, and in 1947 brought together a group of philosophy dons, mostly younger than himself, to pursue these investigations collectively. They met on Saturday mornings during term, and while this group brought to life Austin’s ideal of philosophy as a co-operative enterprise, he controlled the agenda and proceedings, as he had with the Martians during the war.

Voltaire regarded the short tale as a duel with the reader, and a form of complicity. He went out of his way to disparage the ‘littleness’ of the form, and to ridicule all fiction, as fables without a philosophy. But he also wanted to write stories, and to make storytelling respectable.

The main objection to Georges Seurat’s Nude with Blonde Hair – what makes it ‘one of the most puzzling works in the collection’ – is its ‘poor quality’. But the argument that it isn’t by Seurat – even when young and in a formative stage of his career, because Seurat never painted anything so bad – is circular. Félix Fénéon knew him. My bet is that it’s genuine.

Early Works shows Alice Notley feeling her way past the dominant aesthetics of her period – she was a key figure in the downtown New York poetry scene before moving to Paris in 1992 – and discovering a distinct, feminist voice. The poems insist that a woman of honour should be prepared to die for ‘the right to frivolity’. Notley is ‘a girl Samson in a pink/prom dress’, ready to pull down the temples of the avant-garde.

The point of highlighting the vertiginous degree of uncertainty is that we might not be making nearly as big a deal of climate change as we should. We are, as a result, tragically under-prepared for the possibility of really bad outcomes, yet at the same time far too confident in our level of preparation. 

These days, the debate about the balance of private and public investment in the Global South has been settled in favour of private capital. Privately owned mobile and internet networks, potable water and sewerage, utilities companies, mobile payment systems, financial infrastructure, hospitals and clinics all operate alongside, and increasingly replace, decaying public services.

In Old God’s Time Tom Kettle, Barry’s hero, sees the moon rise behind Dalkey Island, and it feels like an eclipse; each time he looks at it, it’s in a different pane of the window. Wave or particle? Continuous or discontinuous? Things, scenes, times come in and out of focus, willingly and not.

Pollen is difficult to dislodge, burrowing down into the weave of fabric and insinuating itself into crevices. Inside our noses are delicate curled plates of bone known as the nasal turbinates, each covered in sticky soft mucosal tissue. Each time we draw breath, dust in the air is trapped here. As a result, the turbinates of a corpse contain a record of a person’s last breaths. 

CERTHIA:            creepy post chicxulub convergent evolution    counter-shadedneoavian therapod winding the spiral...

Early Works shows Alice Notley feeling her way past the dominant aesthetics of her period – she was a key figure in the downtown New York poetry scene before moving to Paris in 1992 – and discovering a distinct, feminist voice. The poems insist that a woman of honour should be prepared to die for ‘the right to frivolity’. Notley is ‘a girl Samson in a pink/prom dress’, ready to pull down the temples of the avant-garde.