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Despite the evidence of what the world ‘has done’ to Neel’s sitters, her portraits are never mawkish. She kept something back: wasn’t it more fun, she said, to play hide and seek with her thoughts, ‘to hide them artfully in little corners?’

Taubes, like many postwar artists and intellectuals, turned to surrealism to articulate the trauma of displacement, the secondary trauma of returning to a diminished homeland, and the lifelong challenge of regaining a sense of coherence – or of going without.

People of every political persuasion now claim Martin Luther King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable opposition, not only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. 

There’s​ a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an...

It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite rationally) anxious about the future. The animal world offers both an escape and the promise of meaning.

Was Shakespeare’s Cell an attempt posthumously to provide Shakespeare with an allegorised dwelling like Pope’s, identifying what the 18th century regarded as the excitingly lawless, archaic fecundity of Shakespeare’s poetic imagination with a psychic underworld of the sort hinted at in Twickenham?

I first encountered George Orwell in 1977, when a brave English teacher got a group of bolshy 14-year-olds to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and told us to write our own dystopia. It isn’t hard to see why peak Orwell might hit at around seventeen. He gives you all the bleakness and naked political passion a teenager could desire.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 19 (Friday 22 September 2023)

Is rugby a participation sport, or an entertainment spectacle? Which should take priority? The newer style of play is making a lot of money for a lot of people, but there is unequivocal evidence that injury rates are climbing, and that repeated head injuries can and do cause permanent damage to the brain.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 19 (Friday 22 September 2023)

‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d done – only it wasn’t me. It was her. Which raised an alarming question: Who, then, was I?’

‘You like poetry?’ he said. ‘Oh god,’ I said. ‘Alright, alright – one word then,’ he said. ‘One word?’ I said. ‘Yes, one ordinary word that you don’t need to think about.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘that’s easy enough.’ ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, darling.’ ‘Raw,’ I said. ‘Raw?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘now you have it.’ ‘I’m not sure I do though,’ he said. ‘Well I don’t know then,’ I said, ‘let’s just leave it.’

The need for prosthetic brainpower has been apparent throughout human history, evidenced by the continual development of techniques and technologies to compensate for our biological inadequacies. The first number systems were developed around five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, making it possible for users to write down what memory might struggle to retain.

While the Romantic view of Vesuvius saw it as a unique phenomenon, a spectacle, for the scientists it was a specimen, a comparator for investigations into the nature of volcanic activity. Newtonian physics had long since opened up space, but for calculating the age of the planet there wasn’t much to go on beyond mythology and the Old Testament.

Antiquities remain, with the possible exception of wildlife, the only illicit commodity that transnational criminal gangs can trade on the open market. You can’t buy or sell people, drugs or weapons on eBay or at international auction houses.

Because each year of your life amounts         to less of your lifethan the year before, the things in it change you less.Horse chestnuts, for example,     ...

Both James and Jahangir were obsessed with hunting, wilfully ensuring that court timetables were disrupted and dictated by the prolonged pursuit of prey, to the frustration of officials. Even so avid a huntsman as James might, however, have struggled to match the emperor’s claim in the Jahangirnama that, since the age of twelve, he had hunted 17,167 animals.

The voice, the face and the gaze, all crucial to our ‘being with others’, are ‘disrupted and distorted’ by chatbots, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, iris scanning, facial coding and all the rest. ‘Pathways to a different world will not be found by internet search engines,’ Jonathan Crary states matter-of-factly. If there is to be a future, it will be offline.

Is Bill Browder an oligarch? His critics think he ticks many of the boxes. He made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, profiting heavily from the newly privatised industries. He was a vocal supporter of Putin even after the dark truths of his regime had become clear, even after Putin had cracked down on numerous other oligarchs, and was allowed to continue to accumulate wealth – until suddenly he wasn’t.

For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages. Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a... Read more

Source: Stumbling Towards Old Age appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Remember the “red tsunami”? If you’re like me, you don’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the number or, lately, the spoofed names. Which begs the question: Who does? People willing to speak with pollsters, I’d wager. Pollsters themselves will explain how they control for this bias, to be sure, but polling itself seems more and more a sucker’s game. Remember predictions last fall of a “red tsunami”? Chris Hayes made that point on Wednesday that the only polls that really matter are the ones voters participate in when they vote. Last night, people voted in elections in two different states. “Those results tell us way more about the state of our democracy and the political strength of the pro-democracy forces in this country than all of today’s other political headlines put together,” says @chrislhayes. pic.twitter.com/SVUPFJ3q1L — All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) September 21, 2023 What special elections around the country tell us is that the GOP is in a hole. And they’re still digging.

Gregory M. Mikkelson

The speed of economic growth hinges to a large extent on the supply of fossil fuel, especially of oil and gas, which depends in turn on pipeline capacity. Thus, if we are to turn the tide against economic growth, pipelines are a good strategic place to start. In what follows I focus on the fight against one pipeline in particular.

Spiderwebs of pipelines hold six continents in thrall to climate-wrecking,

The post How to Take out a Pipeline appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

This week, it was revealed that the Labour Party has further weakened its policies to strengthen workers’ rights.  Labour set out its commitment to ‘raise Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) and make it available to all workers, including the self-employed’ in its 2021 employment rights white paper, A New Deal for Working People. But a document […]