J. Edgar Hoover liked to say he didn’t hire policemen but investigators. Agents were university graduates, only to be seen in dark suits and ties (hats were required when outside). Until 1934, they weren’t allowed to carry guns. ‘I want the public to look upon the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice as a group of gentlemen,’ he said in a magazine interview.
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Keir Starmer will be the next British prime minister. The nation is miserable and conditions are favourable, but this hardly diminishes Starmer’s achievement: he has isolated the left within his party, splashed the flag about, genuflected towards British business and drunk champagne at Murdoch’s birthday do.
Giovanni Amendola had been attacked by fascists on a number of occasions, receiving a savage beating in Rome in December 1923; armed blackshirts hung around outside his flat. But he continued to publish and speak out against Mussolini. He probably thought they wouldn’t go so far as to murder him, that a second Matteotti case was a step too far, even for the fascists.
Both sides of Edward Coke’s reputation have endured. Not long ago the benchers of the Inner Temple refused to name a new building after him because of his brutal prosecution of Walter Raleigh. Yet Coke’s law reports, many of them his own cases, continue to be uniquely relevant to the modern law governing the use and extent of prerogative powers and much else beside. Francis Bacon is a more elusive character.
Ernest Cole’s politics were opaque, he didn’t give much away, but his photographs suggest that he saw racism as a more decisive force in South Africa than the structural injustices of capitalism, even though the ANC – which read racism back onto class struggle – used his work to publicise their cause.
Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare shows us the end. Reading it, you feel Tillman’s clammy grip on your wrist reminding you not to waste time. She offers a writer’s prescription: examine the world closely, and as only you can.
Fashion, the It-girl Alexa Chung once said, is just what happens when you have been wearing one thing for ages, then get bored with it. Is this the reason Fleur Jaeggy has become so fashionable, because readers are tired of big books and humanist fiction, all that inwardness that isn’t really inward, all those vulgar, boring families with ‘all of the advertising’, as Jaeggy once put it, ‘on their side’?
Smell has always been a crucial diagnostic sense, the one that brings us closest to the fundamental properties of matter, and the evolution of perfume follows an unbroken narrative thread that extends from alchemy to modern industrial chemistry.
St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great works have been made in his name, by Botticelli, El Greco, Caravaggio and Mickey Rourke (who took the title role in Liliana Cavani’s Francesco).
All three of Jean Giono’s books are crowned, in their different ways, by killings, done by the hero or heroine and not against them or for them to tackle. An intriguing choice for a pacifist, and a choice that underlines an important strain in Giono’s work. He invites us to pause over phrases such as ‘larger than life’ and ‘getting away with murder’.
I argue that economic methodologists failed the economics profession by not actively pointing out to the economics profession or to the general public that, if an economist’s primary goal was to provide policy advice to society, then the standard methodology being used by applied macroeconomists had serious problems. I see methodologists’ failure as a systemic […]
In case you hadn’t noticed — and how could you not? — there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That’s been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight. (And, by the way, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, Siberia is having its own possibly record fire season.) If you didn’t notice any of this, though, I have a possible explanation. Perhaps the vast clouds of smoke from those fires that recently gave the skies of Chicago and Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C., the worst air quality on the... Read more
Source: A Third Way? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
More, please In Chicago for the next few days for the Netroots Nation conference, so please excuse the abbreviated postings. A taste of Kiev Air raid sirens screamed out across downtown Chicago multiple times and cell phone alerts chirped through the hotel to warn of tornadoes touching down in the area, a rare event according to one report. Friends were stuck on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport until the weather service called all-clear. They texted that could see the tornado from the plane (AP): The weather service warned Wednesday evening that a confirmed tornado was on the ground near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Passengers took shelter and the storm disrupted hundreds of flights, but there were no immediate reports of injuries. A short time later, the weather service said the Chicago forecast area was “currently tornado warning free.” The storm moved into Michigan before passing through the state and into Canada early Thursday. Tornado watches that were in effect for parts of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio all expired. The twister tore the roof of a motel west of the city.
“Remote work poses risks to physical health.” — The Hill
“Swollen eyes, a hunchback, and claw-like hands: What remote-workers will look like by 2100.” — The Daily Mail
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Listen, it’s not me, Capitalism, saying you should be in an office under the watchful eye of a boss who controls your time and every move. It’s actual doctors, health experts, and even the World Health Organization who are worried about your sedentary lifestyle, which everyone knows can be improved by sitting in a poorly ventilated office for eight to ten hours a day.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Always Sunny, Superman: Legacy, Justified, Riverdale, The Venture Bros., Good Omens 2, SDCC/SAG-AFTRA & more!
Labour's Deputy Leader made a welcome pledge to end the 'good chaps' approach to Government, which allowed sleaze and corruption to persist under the Conservatives.
David Sirota interviews Stephen Vladeck about the Supreme Court’s secretive “Shadow Docket.”
- by Aeon Video
- by Paula Marantz Cohen
- by Kurt Gray, Will Blakey & Nicholas DiMaggio
The strategy being employed by the Government seems to be clear: using the veil of impartiality provided by 'independent' reviews to legitimise its agenda, Adeeb Ayton argues
The traditional Beveridge curve suggests that a sharp rise in unemployment is needed to meaningfully lower the job vacancy rate. But the curve shaped by the pandemic labor market may signal a different result.
Governments are run by political parties and for political interests – but they shouldn't be, argues philosopher AC Grayling
To mark the two-day NATO summit in Vilnius, which ends today, I wrote for UnHerd a myth-busting piece about the true nature NATO. The latter presents itself as a purely “defensive alliance… working for peace, security and freedom”. The reality, however, is quite different. Aside from the fact that its most powerful member and de facto leader, the …
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