Reading

Ron DeSantis’s Fourth of July Party Prep List

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ron-desantiss-fourth-of-july-party-prep-list
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 03:00

June 15-22

  • Order fireworks from AmericanMadeFireWorks.com
  • Screen bakeries to find one that hasn’t made cakes for gay weddings, Disney princess-themed parties, birthdays held at woke public schools, Disney Strange World-themed parties, gender reveal celebrations, parties for people who have been to Disney World, retirement parties for DEI trainers, or for Disney President Bob Iger
  • Call Eduardo and crew to schedule extra landscaping for July 2

June 23-30

  • Open fireworks from AmericanMadeFireWorks.com. Sharpie over “Made in China”
  • Make invitation list from secret donors file of dear family friends
  • Screen bands to find one that hasn’t played gay weddings, concerts held at woke universities, bar mitzvahs, Juneteenth parties, quinceañeras, Gay Pride events, any event that has served Bud Light, or for Disney President Bob Iger
  • Sign band.

Sacré Vert

https://www.monbiot.com/2023/06/29/sacre-vert/
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 01:57
French environmental action puts the UK to shame. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th June 2023 While we remain transfixed by a handful of needy egotists in Westminster and the crises they manufacture, across the Channel a revolution is happening. It’s a quiet, sober, thoughtful revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. France is seeking […]

The Oceans are Sending an SOS

https://steadystate.org/the-oceans-are-sending-an-sos/
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:02
by Gary Gardner

Media coverage of the loss of the Titan submersible last week turned the world’s attention to the oceans—that vast, mysterious realm that sits below the surface of our landlocked consciousness. Two factoids in the coverage caught my attention.

The first, emerging from chatter about the extent of the search effort, is that international law requires vessels to respond to an at-sea distress call if they are able to,

The post The Oceans are Sending an SOS appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.


Rye Dag Holmboe: Cloak and Suit and Slipper

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/rye-dag-holmboe/cloak-and-suit-and-slip…
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick up a paintbrush. In Richard Meyer’s account, however, Hirshfield was a canny operator who knew how to play on distinctions between high and low culture.


Blake Morrison: Warty-Fingered Klutzburger

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/blake-morrison/warty-fingered-klutzburg…
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine he’s still claiming to be in limbo as a character: ‘I do not believe I have an essential self.’ But he understands what he sees, and his cartographic analysis (and, despite himself, his self-analysis) is incisive.


Tony Wood: Against Relics

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/tony-wood/against-relics
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
The first two decades of the USSR saw what was then the fastest and largest instance of urban growth in human history. In just thirteen years, the population living in cities and towns more than doubled from 26 million to 56 million. Modernisation was achieved at a tremendous human cost, with gruelling constraints imposed on the bulk of the population, even as it opened up new horizons.


Tim Parks: Buttockitis

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/tim-parks/buttockitis
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Three hundred​ characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep elaborate notes – perhaps sketching out, as I did, a web of relations on a very large sheet of paper?


Rachel Nolan: Always look in the well

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/rachel-nolan/always-look-in-the-well
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
At trials for crimes against humanity, some of the most eloquent testimony comes not from survivors but from skeletons: a bullet hole, or the marks left by a sharp weapon, may be all it takes for defendants’ claims to unravel. But before they can be presented as evidence, the bones must be exhumed, brushed, washed, catalogued and articulated – assembled into a skeleton. Only then can they provide their testimony.


Catherine Hall: Diary

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/catherine-hall/diary
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Missionaries in Jamaica had campaigned for emancipation and were loathed by the planters, who blamed them for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this historical moment when abolitionists defeated pro-slavers? How did it relate to the long history of violence between the two islands?