Reading

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 09:00
What are they hiding? A Feb. 16 filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit in Delaware against Fox News has kicked up a media firestorm: Outlet after outlet described how internal email and text messages quoted in the document, a filing for summary judgment, showed that network honchos knew that former president Donald Trump’s election-theft claims were lies — and allowed them to air anyhow. Yet the filing is filled with frustrating dead ends, the result of the network’s aggressive effort to prevent disclosure of many of the internal communicationsthat came out of discovery in the case, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News. The black passages in the document raise the questions: What is Fox News hiding? And will those passages ever be unredacted? As the Dominion filing makes clear, Fox News executives panicked in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election. The network had called Arizona on election night for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a move regarded as treason by the network’s MAGA crowd, which declared viewers would flee to the competition, especiallyconservative cable news outlet Newsmax.
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:52

In her 94 years, Elaine Mokhtefi has lived several lives. Born Elaine Klein in New York, just months before the stock market crash of 1929, she was expelled from university for refusing to obey segregation on public transport. After becoming the student leader of an international movement for world federalism, she was expelled for being […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:52

Brendan Behan died at just 41 years of age after he collapsed in a Dublin public house in March 1964. To Joan Littlewood, the pioneering figure of working-class theatre in post-war Britain, it was nothing short of a tragic waste of talent: ‘I was so angry with Brendan for dying that I felt like kicking […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:52

On 29 April 1996, Newcastle United manager Kevin Keegan gave a legendary post-match interview to Sky Sports. Faced with the prospect of a tense Premier League title race, and responding to claims by Man United manager Alex Ferguson that Newcastle’s next opponents would go easy on them for certain unknown reasons, Keegan launched into a […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:51

Austerity is back. After a brief but disastrous experiment with debt-financed tax cuts, the Conservatives have returned to their comfort zone, telling us that decisive action is required to prevent government debt from spiralling out of control. Once again, there is no alternative: we must tighten our belts. While the rhetoric matches Osborne’s in 2010, […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:47

Public provision for play, specifically outdoor spaces allocated solely for children’s use, is a relatively new thing. Germany had ‘sand gardens’ in the 1880s, later introduced in other countries, with the first dedicated ‘playgrounds’ being built towards the end of the century. As the population of cities grew, a need to do something with children — […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:47

Carles Viñas’ latest book is not a history of football in the Soviet Union. It’s the story of how the sport gained a foothold in the Russian Empire and how the Bolsheviks decided it could be useful to them. As Viñas puts it in the introduction: ‘There were members of the Tsarist court who rejected […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

When the techno DJ Jeff Mills pulled up in his cab to play at Sankeys Soap in Manchester in the mid-1990s, he said, ‘Oh my god, this is just like Detroit.’ At that time, Emma Warren of the club’s promoters Bugged Out confirms, ‘There was nothing around — just some cabbies, an old pub and cafe. […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

Architecture, or at least construction, is one of the ugliest, thorniest problems of the entire climate crisis. It depends upon who you ask, and one can certainly find a bewilderingly inconsistent array of statistics, but the construction, running, and maintenance of buildings contributes something around half of all global carbon emissions. Producing cement and steel, […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

Eurotrash, which has now been re-issued in its entirety on DVD and is also available to stream, started in 1993 and, initially at least, aired on Friday nights at 10.30 PM on the ever-interesting Channel 4 of the day. It was one of the first programmes to be explicitly pitched at the ‘post-pub’ crowd, or […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:46

T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) opens by imagining an archaeologist in the post-apocalyptic future surveying surviving remnants of modernism. If they gazed at a Picasso painting in isolation from its original social context, Clark asks, ‘What forms of life would future viewers reconstruct from this material?’ […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:45

In 2022, architecture’s social media is divided between ‘I Luv Brutalism’ accounts — all snapshots of the National Theatre — and ‘Traditional Western Architecture’ accounts apparently managed by Greek statues. Modernism, it seems, is still controversial. Except on the furthest fringes of the far right, debate does not still rage about whether or not Picasso or Stravinsky […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:44

An old man is talking into a microphone, standing in front of the wire fence of a children’s playground between decrepit prefab blocks amid lovely greenery. ‘On the 2nd of September was the birthday of our Dimitrovgrad,’ he says and starts singing: ‘The city we built, we built with love, the city of our youth.’ […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 07:30
What’s he actually saying? Aaron Blake takes a look at Trump’s latest slogan: Even for a former president known for casting situations in the most apocalyptic terms possible, and his enemies as being as nefarious as possible, it was a remarkable rhetorical flourish. “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Donald Trump said Saturday night at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” The line validates long-held suspicions that Trump’s 2024 campaign amounts to something of a “revenge tour.” Trump has disputed that his goal is to stick it to his enemies; now he’s admitting that it is a revenge tour of sorts — if not for him personally, then for his supporters. But as much as anything, it reflects just how much the Republican Party, despite its apparent interest in turning the page in 2024, has enabled Trump to rise again.
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 07:00
‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists have for years been arguing (e.g. here) about the importance of the New Classical Counter Revolution in economics. ‘Helping’ to change the way macroeconomics is done today — with rational expectations, Euler equations, intertemporal optimization, and microfoundations — their main critique of New Classical macroeconomics is that it didn’t incorporate price stickiness […]