While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war. In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be... Read more
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And meanness? The Fuck-your-feelings crowd is all about theirs. All the time. And America, fuck, yeah. But what besides flag-waving and chest-thumping and damp-eyed singing of Lee Greenwood’s anthem does America mean to them? Created equal? Hanging together or hanging separately? E pluribus unum? Equal justice for all? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Leave no team member behind? Not damned likely. It doesn’t seem MAGA holds any values more aspirational than every man for himself, cultural grievance, and not seeing white dominance slip. Their America is more about shibboleths and empty symbols, about tribes and owning the libs. In Jesus’ name. “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs” (if you know the reference). Everyone else? Fuck ’em. I posited to two vets over lunch recently that this country holds up the military as America’s best. Service. Duty. Sacrifice. Everyone has a job. Everyone gets fed, housed and clothed, medical care. Leave no team member behind. A code of honor: you watch my back, I watch yours. But inside the fence line only.
This is US CPI… I don’t know if this is what the Art degree monetarist morons mean by their figure of speech “inflation!” but maybe… I don’t understand a lot about how these peoples non technical brains work… Anyway if you look at this price index it hasn’t peaked as of the January report…
This is in contrast to Bills report on Australia below… you can’t say the US CPI has peaked…
It seemed to have peaked looking at the December report at 297 but now since January 1 we’ve had a significant impulsive increase in fiscal flow and January reported a 2 point increase in this index to a new high…. so this appears to have the Art degree monetarist psycho morons panties all in a twist with all the drama…
Doctor Who's Jodie Whittaker stars in Capture, a satirical short from Financial Times tackling child online safety in a very "unique" way.
Yet another shameful episode from ‘long-time servant of the security state’ Starmer The UK’s lurch toward fascism continued last night with yet another shameful – and shamefully unsurprising – episode of cowardice and betrayal by Keir Starmer and the shell of the Labour party under his control. With the Tories’ repressive ‘National Security Bill’ in […]
What might it mean for the way we think about abortion if we take seriously the problem of what fictional narrative – novels and stories and films – says about it, or doesn’t say, what it makes impossible to say? Can we tell stories about abortion that don’t get snagged on gendered assumptions about human nature and moral feeling, that think in different psychological terms, or not in psychological terms at all?
Perhaps by making pain formal, or rendering it as a joke, Diane Seuss also makes it tolerable. If frank: sonnets is haunted by corpses, the poet’s own body is also an abiding concern throughout: ‘There is a force that breaks the body, inevitable,/the by-product is pain, unexceptional as a rain/gauge, which has become arcane, rhyme, likewise.’ Here pain and rhyme are both understood as forms of measurement, records of injury.
Kate Forbes’s evangelical supporters appeal to plurality of thought, to liberty of conscience, even to protected characteristics, though they are not always known for extending these considerations within the church. How many Free Church members openly make the case for LGBTQ rights? None, so far as I know; most of them would see this as defining the limits of Christian profession.
Drawing was never just drawing: Joseph Beuys was already thinking, it seems, in terms of an expanded notion of what art might be; a drawing might show nature, but also itself appear as a fragment of the natural world. To contribute to art, Beuys held, you had to go beyond art.
Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy.
The terror that Mariana Enríquez works with depends precisely on her refusal of repression. In her fiction, blood isn’t spattered off screen. It’s splurged all over the picture. And so Our Share of Night has its other pulp mode: super natural horror.
The question of agency here is vexed and political (it’s also gendered). Does the authorship of Hilma af Klint’s spiritualist paintings lie with the medium or her spirit guides? And why do so many drawings by mediums look so similar? Is this the visual language of the living or the dead?
DESIGNER HILARY: So tell me about your house.
HOMEOWNER AVERY: It’s in a beautiful neighborhood, not far from a Starbucks. It has a charming llama habitat, and I love the wood built-ins in the dining room.
HOMEOWNER TRENT: There’s only one bathroom though. It’s accessible by shimmying through an abandoned mine shaft and riding a rusted minecart to an open pit.
AVERY: Even though I love this house, I’d really like a faucet in the kitchen. Right now, we have to lower a bucket into a well, and the water is full of toxic metals.
TRENT: I want to sell it. I have double vision from mercury poisoning, and there are demons in the basement.
REALTOR DAVID: You absolutely should sell it. This ugly house makes me retch.
AVERY: I want to stay. Our toddler is possessed and crawling up walls, but the dining room is Jamaican mahogany.
In the Byzantine world, Normans were ‘Franks’, and to the Scots they were English. Like the Vikings, the Normans didn’t maintain an empire but were assimilated where they invaded. What then remains of their myth of multiple conquests?
When I was 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool.
You didn’t have to work in the financial services industries to be a yuppie, but the most famous cultural depictions were from that sector. Even their clothes and accessories acquired a broader audience. The Filofax was an ancestor of the smart phone in its capacity to blur the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’.
Students want – or think they want – more and faster feedback. So tutors write more and more, faster and faster, producing paragraph on paragraph that students, in moments of sheepish honesty, sometimes admit they don’t read. However infuriating, it’s understandable. This material is far from our best work. Much of it is vague, rushed or cribbed.
At the interface of the orchestra and the audience the conductor is the recipient of two quite different waves of transference. At his back, an amorphous crowd of strangers beam expectation at him. They have paid to experience something amazing. Variously informed about what exactly he is doing, they are happy to submit themselves to his mystique and charisma. To them, he is the high priest, guardian of the sacred texts, the leader.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 6 (Friday 03 March 2023)
If you have enough money, even being sanctioned by the British government is no impediment to using London’s courts to silence your critics. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 explicitly excludes money sent to the UK to pay for legal advice and litigation. Among the beneficiaries of this exemption was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 6 (Friday 03 March 2023)
Ovens, fridges, vacuums, car keys, radios, speakers: all of them now contain microchips. An ordinary car contains dozens of them. A posh car contains a thousand. And those are just the standard consumer items of the mid-20th century. As for the things we think of as being this century’s new technology, they are some of the most complicated and beautiful artefacts humanity has ever made, mainly because of the chips they contain.
It grew in the hallway beside the pot plant,the ashtray, and the Yellow Pages left ajar.It started under floorboards, unspooledbetween the carpets and their waferings of underlay.It tracked the...
In this new economy, dogs became commodities – designed and standardised. Breeds were now brands, invested with cultural and social capital. The Duchess of Newcastle’s borzois, for instance, were associated with feminine, aristocratic and ‘oriental’ qualities – ‘as romantic and avant-garde as Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes’.
Letter from right-wing, pro-Israel group warns Green party leaders not to offer a home to Jews who support human rights for Palestinians – or who dare to say what the Forde report and others already admitted: Labour’s ‘crisis’ was a scam. The Greens will shame themselves if they cave in to this bullying Showing no […]