Why, after so many years, is she with me now?We who were not close in lifewalk among the caribou lichenwhose coral-like low forms, white against the mossesand wild blueberry in its red phase,seem...
Reading
Nettel is a mother, and she seems to be saying that ‘normal mothers’ do think ugly thoughts – or rather, that there is no such thing as a ‘normal mother’. There is a strong tradition of works that connect maternal ambivalence to horror tropes – Rosemary’s Baby, The Fifth Child, We Need to Talk about Kevin – but Still Born is different.
The government recognises the possibility of persecution by a foreign state, organised criminal groups or people traffickers. But for the many people let down and mistreated by institutions of the British state – social services, education authorities, police officers, prison guards, health officials – redress is elusive.
Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion of movement – were a wonder whose spell was cast by speed; and speed was what the slapstick cinematic chase both celebrated and satirised. Of all the great silent clowns, no one was swifter than Buster Keaton.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 2 (Friday 06 January 2023)
An armchair has been placed by the window where the woman prefers to spend her holidays. By the way, she plays the tuba. When she was a young woman she dedicated herself to the tuba.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 2 (Friday 06 January 2023)
The realisation that one might be show-offy in a good way is among Donne’s chief bequests to English literature, a salutary corrective to the 16th-century cult of Sidneian sprezzatura. The embrace of effort – the wish to impress, to delight, to dazzle, to convince or convert, and the willingness to be seen working at it – is the secret to the deathless charm of ‘The Flea’ and the pathos of the ‘Holy Sonnets’.
Q: Can we get ice cream? (Age 2)
A: Sure, honey! But the word “cream” incorrectly suggests that this is a dairy product. In reality, it’s a congealed mass of artificial gums and pastes that are almost certainly not permitted for human consumption in any other major democracy. Enjoy!
Q: What happened to Mufasa? (Age 3)
A: He’s sleeping.
Q: Can we get a puppy? (Age 4)
A: Maybe in a few years, when Daddy’s ability to say no—along with his overall sense of self—has been sufficiently worn down.
Q: Where does rain come from? (Age 5)
A: Good question. First, water on the ground evaporates up into the sky. There, it collects in clouds until it falls to the ground as rain, and the whole pattern starts over again. It’s called the water cycle, the only thing I learned as a child that I still remember. Seriously. I don’t know the different types of triangles or how to write in cursive or what hopscotch even is, but the water cycle? I could write a dissertation on it, baby.
Who or what was Rimbaud? What is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors alone?
To accuse Henry ‘Chips’ Channon of snobbery or social climbing is almost absurd: society was what gave his life meaning, and it’s thanks to his fascination with the rich and the grand that he left such an intimate record. The life Channon describes with such loving relish now seems as remote as Saint-Simon’s Versailles.
Generating the electricity to get just one ad to appear on your screen can produce a puff of carbon dioxide sufficiently large that, if it were cigarette smoke, you would be able to see it. Showing a single digital ad to a single user involves, on average, emitting between roughly a tenth and a whole pint of carbon dioxide. And the digital ad business puffs on quite a scale.
What is going to happen – it is indelicate to ask, but we need to know – to all that shit? The torrents of water from simultaneous ablutions, micturitions, power showers? And the steady autumn downpours of our rainy season.
No American reporter had been expelled from the Reich until Thompson received a hand-delivered letter from the Gestapo that accused her of offending ‘national self-respect’, rendering them unable to extend a ‘further right of hospitality’. The international press corps saw her off at the train station the next morning, her arms full of the roses they had given her.
On BookTok the cycle goes: rating books, simping over them, bringing ‘overrated’ books down a peg, and then rehabilitating them when the backlash goes too far. But there is a worry that we’re all being taken for a ride.
Secrets tucked into trench coats miss the point of the Five Eyes and obscure its political implications. The history of Anglo-American surveillance matters, from its late imperial beginnings to the contemporary needs of American power. The idea that the existence of a vast system of global surveillance might be problematic doesn’t have much purchase in any of the Five Eyes countries.
Right up until her death in 1992 Mitchell remained committed to what she liked to call ‘AEOH’ – Abstract Expressionist Old Hat. The recent retrospective of her work, on view in Paris until 27 February, sweeps away the self-effacing acronyms.
Any effort to compare and rank research quality using a star rating will unavoidably favour particular criteria. After individuals and institutions identify these criteria – once they know what excellence looks like – they will focus their efforts on meeting them or, at least, on representing their work as if they are doing so. Trying something different will seem rash.
The myth of Delius’s individualism may once have been a useful way of understanding his music. Positioning him as a man outside of his time, uninterested in and unanswerable to his surroundings, made him more attractive, more easily categorised. But Delius was just as influenced and shaped by the politics and culture of his day as any other composer.
Now the gap between the lowest and highest paid in the UK is one of the highest in the OECD, Iain Overton looks at the role of public sector pay in widening the disparities
Peter Kim Schotch, emeritus professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University, has died. The following memorial notice was written by Gillman Payette (Calgary): Peter Kim Schotch, age 76, died on December 22, 2022 at his home in Brookside Nova Scotia. Peter was born on July 26th, 1946, in Montreal, Quebec. He attended the University of Waterloo, getting a BA and finally a PhD in Philosophy writing a dissertation in modal logic in 1973 under the supervision of J.S. Minas. (Interestingly, his external examiner was C. West Churchman). In 1972 he was hired by the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University and only fully retired in 2019. At the end of his time at Dalhousie he had reached the rank of full professor and was the Munro Chair of Metaphysics. Despite being a logician or perhaps because of it, Peter liked teaching existentialism, philosophy of literature, and philosophy of art. He was also a dedicated union-supporter, serving on the Dalhousie Faculty Association’s bargaining team for the second, third, fifth and sixth collective agreements and sharing duties as Chief Negotiator for the 1984-87 agreement. He also shared the position of DFA president in 1997-98. P. K.
There has been a fair amount of concern over the threats that ChatGPT and AI in general pose to teaching. But perhaps there’s an upside? Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) entertains the possibility: Without wanting to diss the underlying neural network, but ChatGPT is a bullshitter in the (Frankfurt) sense of having no concern for the truth at all… I have seen many of my American colleagues remark that while ChatGPT is, as of yet, unable to handle technical stuff skillfully, it can produce B- undergraduate papers.
New data from the Metropolitan Police shows the scale of sexual violence in London's hospitals
In a recent post, we introduced the Multivariate Core Trend (MTC), a measure of inflation persistence in the core sectors of the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price index. With data up to February 2022, we used the MCT to interpret the nature of post-pandemic price spikes, arguing that inflation dynamics were dominated by a persistent component largely common across sectors, which we estimated at around 5 percent. Indeed, over the year, inflation proved to be persistent and broad based, and core PCE inflation is likely to end 2022 near 5 percent. So, what is the MCT telling us today? In this post, we extend our analysis to data through November 2022 and detect signs of a decline in the persistent component of inflation in recent data. We then dissect the layers of inflation persistence to fully understand that decline.
