Reading

Created
Fri, 01/12/2023 - 00:00
Consent could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio tells Kate, with shrew-bashing relish, ‘your father hath consented/That you shall be my wife, your dowry ’greed on;/And, will you, nill you, I will marry you.’
Created
Fri, 01/12/2023 - 00:00
The mop-haired Argentinian president, Javier Milei, has many well-known eccentricities. He claims to commune with his deceased dog through a spirit medium, and that four of the dogs he expensively cloned from the original pet offer him expert political and economic advice. But behind all this, there is a hard ideological core.
Created
Fri, 01/12/2023 - 00:00
The Hutu authorities​ in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga writes in The Barefoot Woman, portrayed the Tutsi as ‘inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate’. Mukasonga’s literary project responds to this dehumanisation by reclaiming Tutsi life from the debris of Rwandan history.
Created
Fri, 01/12/2023 - 00:00

Dear Pam,

Thank you for thinking of me and my son for the past eleven years as you and the rest of your firm’s staff gather around to add your signatures and nothing else to the non-denominational Costco holiday cards you send out every December.

The jolly gender-neutral snowperson last year? Classic yet updated for this LGBTQ-inclusive era. The bluebird perched on an icy pinecone the year before? Timeless. The masked gingerbread people in various colors holding hands around the earth on 2020’s greeting? A subtle yet vital nod to the social unrest of that tough pandemic year.

Truly, it means so much that you haven’t forgotten us after the ten months and $62,302 worth of your expertise and advocacy that resulted in a Parenting Plan that requires me to deliver my only child once a week to a man who once drank a bottle of Wild Turkey and then broke into my public school classroom at nine-thirty in the morning while I was teaching a lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird to eighth graders.

Created
Fri, 01/12/2023 - 00:00
Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and excellent citizens’, as Eric Williams put it. They founded charitable schools, hospitals, orphanages and libraries, making them ‘the leading humanitarians of their age’.
Created
Fri, 01/12/2023 - 00:00
The defeat of The Voice leaves Aboriginal culture stuck in the same queasy relationship to the white nation and its essentially European notion of history that it has been in since the early 20th century, when serious efforts to acknowledge Indigenous culture began. The result is a mixture of conservation, invented tradition and misunderstanding.