The mood in Kyiv is mixed. The war is not over, but it has receded. People are beginning to think about how it might end, and what kind of Ukraine might come afterwards. What will happen when the soldiers come home?
Reading
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 16 (Friday 28 July 2023)
Fiction can do without all sorts of things that seemed essential to 19th-century novelists: it doesn’t need to comment on society, or provide descriptions of settings and scenery, or a linear chronology, or a fixed point of view. So why are characters so stubborn?
Diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task is not statecraft but the promotion of their country’s ‘interests’ – reducible to the arms industry and a few other national giants. What would Unilever do? Did his excellency bring the brochure? The diplomat: an honest person sent to hawk stuff abroad for the good of his country.
Richard Mosse seeks what can’t be seen. He employs military or industrial camera technologies sensitive to light spectra invisible to the eye; his subjects are ignored or remote catastrophes.
In the middle of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other problems is that it doesn’t change enough. But we understand the horror.
Ian Fleming once said that ‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know.’ But it’s just as true that Sidney Reilly wasn’t James Bond: in Fleming’s novels (and even more in the films based on them), 007’s individual actions make all the difference.
Stephen Vaughan’s life reminds us that there is no sweeping historical change that cannot also be measured in the small, incremental, often painful adjustments of everyday life. His political service, and his dedication to business, came at a high personal cost.
There are good reasons why some progressives tolerated racial affirmative action without feeling much enthusiasm for it, or are even quietly pleased that it has ended, hopeful that something better, more equitable and far-reaching can be put in its place. More disturbing than the loss of affirmative action itself are the circumstances that led to its demise.
The legislation would repeal a restriction on striking workers receiving SNAP benefits.
The post As Hollywood Strikes, Sen. John Fetterman Introduces Food Stamps Bill for Workers on Picket Line appeared first on The Intercept.
It’s been devastating, even if no one’s paying attention. Three months of fighting in Sudan between the army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) has left at least 3,000 people dead and wounded at least 6,000 more. Over two million people have been displaced within the country, while another 700,000 have fled to neighboring nations. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the health facilities in Khartoum, the capital, and other combat zones are now out of service, so the numbers of dead and injured are believed to be far higher than recorded, and bodies have been rotting for days in the streets of the capital, as well as in the towns and villages of... Read more
Source: That Other War appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Be careful with your car’s AC North Carolina ain’t Phoenix, but it’s still hot. Especially on the coastal plain. Probably where you are as well. CNN’s Alexandra Meeks issues a warning in her “5 Things” newsletter: More than 140 million Americans from coast-to-coast are under heat alerts today. Parts of the Northeast will see their highest temperatures this year while temperatures in the Midwest will be up to 20 degrees above normal. The extreme weather has also gripped the country’s southern tier from Southern California to Florida since June. And Phoenix, one of the hardest-hit cities in this summer’s scorching heat, is in its fourth week in a row of temperatures over 110 degrees, smashing a previous record of 18 straight days. President Joe Biden is expected to announce actions to combat extreme weather in a briefing today as the heat wave expands across the US. This was Phoenix in May: Another toddler got burned the same way in Colorado this month. Solar-heated hot tub You thought Florida was too politically hot for trans people?
’Sup. It’s your best friend, Avery or something. As you can tell from the wind-whipped hair on the non-shaved half of my head, I rode my motorcycle here from my eclectically furnished studio apartment in our city’s equivalent neighborhood to the Lower East Side portrayed in Rent. That’s where my similarities to those characters end.
I’m not some lesbian with one foot out of the closet written into the script to attract queer viewers. I’m straight. A heterosexual. That dress looks incredible on you—give me a spin. Wow. The blue stripes really highlight your eyes.
Like so many young professionals these days, I’m a multi-hyphenate: personal trainer / cat sitter / hairdresser / carpenter / alt-rock guitarist / dyke mechanic—whoops, I meant bike mechanic. Some would say that’s the same thing. I would say that the typification of manual labor as butch upholds the marginalizing binary framework through which our society views the queer community. That was the thesis of my gender studies capstone at Smith, where I never once had sex with a woman.
John Maynard Keynes – “Anything we can do, we can afford.”
Money tells you how much of society’s resources you can command. Can you use that building, that land or that person?
It’s more than that, of course, but this is its most fundamental use.
But we are all familiar with the fact that often there are empty buildings, unemployed people and land which is not being used productively. We also know that often what people, land and buildings are being used to do is a bad: a net negative.
99% of Wall Street, for just one example. 85% of the US military, for a second.
This report, which I wrote for Carbon Tracker, has just been released (Keen 2023). The main report can be downloaded from this link, after logging in to Carbon Tracker (which just requires submitting your email and a password—no financial involved): Loading the DICE Against Pensions – Carbon Tracker Initiative I’d prefer if you downloaded from … Continue reading "Loading the DICE against pension funds: Flawed economic thinking on climate has put your pension at risk"
Byline Times digs into a new hard-right outfit boosted by Lord Bailey of Partygate
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Star Trek, Sinéad OConnor/SNL, Doctor Who, Harley Quinn, TMNT, SDCC/SAG-AFTRA/WGA, Secret Invasion, and more!
While the paternity of the theoretical apparatus underlying the new neoclassical synthesis in macro is contested, there is wide agreement that the methodological framework was largely architected by Robert Lucas … Bringing a representative agent meant foregoing the possibility to tackle inequality, redistribution and justice concerns. Was it deliberate? How much does this choice owe […]
David Sirota speaks with financial regulation experts about big banks’ interest rate grift.
- by Aeon Video
Banning the cyanide bombs — planted throughout the American West in service of the livestock industry — has been the Mansfield family’s mission.
The post Secretive Federal Agency’s Days of Killing Pets With Poison Bombs May Finally Be Ending appeared first on The Intercept.
- by Doreen Fleet
- by Scott R Stroud
Current UK Government policy seems aimed at continuing to pollute for as long as we can and then switching it all off at the last minute, writes Charlie Gardner