If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously faked, but to what end? Who wants this Tate Modern for philistines, this Senate House for illiterates, this Berghain for people who can’t dance?
Reading
Russell Banks admitted that he wrote about the sort of people who voted for Trump; those were the people he came from. He wanted them to understand themselves better. But that didn’t mean he was an optimist. The real-life story of Sadie Marchant had a happy ending insofar as the Shakers were vindicated. Banks’s story is different.
Samuel Adams was an ascetic, indifferent to worldly baubles, decent comforts, respectable clothing. His republican vision for Massachusetts was forbiddingly austere, not an open marketplace free of intrusive British taxation, but what he termed, uninvitingly, a ‘Christian Sparta’. Religion was not then a private matter of belief unrelated to political attitudes.
Holding a coin that someone else held two thousand years ago creates a special feeling of connectedness. Anyone who has handed a bag of cheap Roman bronzes around a room of bored undergraduates will have seen first-hand the way it electrifies the atmosphere. Coins make history feel real. And there are an awful lot of them out there.
In ancient Egyptian culture, images and words were in a state of constant oscillation between letters, sounds and things. Hieroglyphic letters require as much typographical standardisation as the letters of any alphabet in order to be read. What makes a beautiful image of an owl into a beautiful calligraphic letter M is rigorous formal regularisation; a perched bird turning its gaze directly towards you 𓅓.
Russia is fighting Ukraine about borders. This means that, as well as dodging bombs and getting used to living in the dark, residents of the border zone have to decide if they are ‘really’ Russian or ‘really’ Ukrainian. Some will no doubt be keeping the non-chosen identity in a trunk in the attic, to be retrieved in case of future need. But the logic of war is stern: those who choose to be Ukrainians are also opting to hate Russians as the enemy invader, while those in Ukraine who choose to be Russians are contemplating the possibility of having to move east.
Isaac Deutscher’s contributions to Workers’ Fight in 1940 fall short of an unambiguous rejection of revolutionary defeatism; it is possible that Tamara Deutscher altered her husband’s words, but without the original tape recording it’s hard to know for sure. What is clear, though, is that he couldn’t accept the social patriotism of the Labour Party and most people on the left: ‘This was just too trivial to me, too conventional and too obviously based on the normal bourgeois democratic assumptions and premises of their policies.’
after the hard seedspushed in as deep aspossible & kept alive on dew
The characters in Ned Beauman’s book are defined by the extent to which they care about animals. Halyard doesn’t unless they’re going to make him money or send him to jail. Resaint empathises too much. But does Beauman think we should care about animals?
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mali was the poster child of democratisation in Africa. It is now seen as the West’s biggest disappointment on the continent. It has experienced three coups in a decade and was more or less ungovernable in the intervening years. Today, it is ruled by a military junta that persecutes political opponents, derides the West and has Vladimir Putin as a patron. But just as the West’s lionisation of Malian democracy was excessive, its current disenchantment might be too.
1. Snide comment.
2. Snidier comment about other’s political party affiliation.
3. Snidiest comment unwittingly based on an Instagram meme about a certain political party.
4. Retort based unwittingly on another Facebook meme created as a response to the first.
5. Sweeping unassailable generalization.
6. Righteous indignation.
7. Fact.
8. Conspiracy theory.
9. More facts.
10. More conspiracy theories.
11. Conspiracy theory.
12. Counter–conspiracy theory.
13. Fact?
14. Fact?
15. Snide slogan masquerading as fact about issue not directly related but rather inferred from stance of preceding discourse.
16. Snidier slogan masquerading as fact about yet another inferred issue.
17. Didactic speech about the importance of using reason, facts, and research rather than snide slogans and didactic speeches.
18. “Research.”
19. Question veracity of sources.
20. Question the word “veracity.”
21. Question mental fortitude.
22. Righteous indignation.
23. Massive unfalsifiable statement.
Markets were, as Friedrich Hayek put it with uncharacteristic exuberance, a ‘marvel’, co-ordinating economic decisions in ‘a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand’. They are, you might say, a device for pooling our ignorance. This way of looking at markets may not have been revolutionary, but it was genuinely illuminating, and Hayek would describe it as the only ‘discovery’ he had ever made, hoping it had finally disposed of that ‘skeleton in our cupboard’ – the fiction of ‘economic man’.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 3 (Thursday 19 January 2023)
The movie wears well, and is certainly better than I remembered, but time has also made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare than it used to be or was probably meant to be. Or closer to a certain Shakespeare, the one who loves terrible jokes and cheerfully allows them to accompany violence and distress.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: The Rookie, Night Court, WWE/Vince McMahon, Doctor Who, South Park, The Three-Body Problem, SNL, and more!
At least some others are exhibiting some skepticism…
These types of statements are even more ridiculous than the NATO/CIA shills who predict the imminent collapse of the Chicoms https://t.co/kIny2dC0cn
— Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) January 18, 2023
If you like some alternative to regime content Beattie is a good follow…
“It will be difficult to make an entire class completely ChatGPT cheatproof. But we can at least make it harder for students to use it to cheat.” (I’m reposting this to encourage those teaching philosophy courses to share what they are doing differently this semester so as to teach effectively in a world in which their students have access to ChatGPT. It was originally published on January 4th.) That’s Julia Staffel (University of Colorado, Boulder) in a helpful video she has put together on ChatGPT and its impact on teaching philosophy. In it, she explains what ChatGPT is, demonstrates how it can be used by students to cheat in ways that are difficult to detect, and discusses what we might do about it. You can watch it below: See our previous discussions on the topic: Conversation Starter: Teaching Philosophy in an Age of Large Language Models If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them: GPT-3 Edition Oral Exams in Undergrad Courses? Talking Philosophy with ChatGPT Philosophers On GPT-3 (updated with replies by GPT-3)
Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin both struggled with the upheaval of the 20th century. Arendt's The Human Condition wins the argument.
Unfortunately, it's prudent to be mindful of what our Davos overlords are plotting. But they seem mighty unsettled.
As ministers turn their focus to cutting away at workers’ basic civil liberties and waging war on their trade unions, the NHS crisis—said to be resulting in hundreds of deaths every week—continues. At the base of that crisis are a series of political decisions to underfund the health service and undervalue the workers within it. […]
The arrest of Andrew Tate – over allegations he denies – has put sex trafficking back on the news agenda. Sian Norris looks at the horrors inflicted on the industry's victims
- by Julie Pfeiffer
- by Psyche Film