Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 5 (Friday 17 February 2023)
Reading
Palestinians understand that Israel is a democracy for Jews and an apartheid regime for non-Jews. But just like the Green Line, this is a false separation, since the Jewish democratic system itself is dependent on ethnic exclusion and demographic engineering. The liberals condemning the rise of fascism in Israeli politics are fighting for the rights of only part of the population.
Ming Smith often compares herself to a blues or jazz musician. ‘If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song,’ she says, ‘that’s what I would want them to feel when they look at my work.’ There’s sometimes a melancholy in her photographs of Black life, but it’s offset by the same ironical awareness that infuses the blues.
Many maps have been offered over the years to assist the reader-quester, but if somebody gets a map out in one of Auden’s poems it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In one lyric a lover is advised to ‘Stand up and fold/Your map of desolation’. Auden country still feels unchartable, a space into which you are dropped, given a few co-ordinates and left to fend for yourself.
When Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979, images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must have something figured out. Wang Huning wasn’t so sure. The America he saw was neither an imperialist paper tiger nor universally prosperous. He kept noticing its contradictions.
Medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to God and the devil, and they saw themselves as vulnerable to interference from human and supernatural forces, to both good and bad ends.
There is a tendency to linger on the physical vulnerability and discomfort evoked by Veronica Ryan’s pieces, part of a series called Infection which includes plaster casts of yellowing orthopaedic pillows, but it would be a mistake to project Ryan’s slow path to professional recognition onto the work itself. This isn’t outsider art.
The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits or portraits of other women artists, presenting, implicitly, an idea of the female painter as both a subject for portraiture and a professional in her own right.
To find her guilty, the lawyer says, would be to decide that Laurence is a monster – ‘It is more convenient to see her as a monster’ – and such a decision would be a verdict but would not be justice (‘un arrêt, mais pas la justice’). She talks of mothers and children, born and unborn, exchanging cells that scientists call ‘chimerical’. ‘We women are all monsters, but terribly human monsters.’
As Jessica Marglin argues, the Shamama case offers an ‘insight into the way legal belonging was proved – not only in the Shamama lawsuit but in countless cases both before and since: as a narrative’. Scholars of European nationalism have long understood that citizenship and nationality cannot be readily equated, and that legal and ethnocultural belonging are not the same thing, but there is nonetheless a benefit in viewing these issues through the eyes of a Tunisian Jew.
The idea that art should be made by and available to all has been a rallying cry for socialists for decades. Contrary to stereotype, the traditional demands of the labour movement haven’t just been about ensuring people have food on their plates and heat in their homes, but about enabling the beauty and creativity stifled by […]
In letters to the EPA and NTSB, the lawmakers expressed concern about the safety of East Palestine residents, given the release of hazardous materials, as well as efforts to prevent future derailments.
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Not surprisingly, Iran and Russia are increasing their cooperation.
A MintPress study of the 20 most influential U.S. news outlets found virtually no coverage of the esteemed journalist’s revelations linking Washington to the pipeline attacks.
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JP Morgan plans to raise private capital for a Ukrainian investment fund.
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How a bleak Christian theology influenced the development of the dismal science.
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By Binoy Kampmark / CounterPunch Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat. To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on […]
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- by Aeon Video
- by Michael Slepian
By DemocracyNow! When the Nord Stream pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia to Germany were damaged last September, U.S. officials were quick to suggest Russia had bombed its own pipelines. But according to a new report by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, it was the U.S. Navy that carried out the sabotage, with help […]
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So far, Western sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports appear to be working. But in the longer term, Russia may find ways to evade the price cap imposed on its oil sales.
Any commitment to do so would be to gift Stalin Starmer an excuse to expel him altogether Clamour is – understandably – growing for former Labour leader Jeremey Corbyn to announce he will stand as an independent in his Islington North seat, after his cowardly successor confirmed what everyone knew: that despite the (sham) EHRC’s […]