The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.
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Andrew Rosindell, the Romford Conservative MP currently on bail for alleged sexual offences which he strongly denies, made an unannounced appearance at a White Ribbon day event - drawing criticism from community members and a debate over his ongoing public engagements.
As President Zelensky meets President Biden and the White House approves $200 million in support to Ukraine, Zarina Zabrisky looks at the reasons why the funding faces deadlock in the US Congress in December and assesses the potentially disastrous effect of delay on Ukraine.
Two months on from the horrors of 'Black Saturday', the question of why a country normally so sensitive to risk was caught off guard has an answer that undermines the future prospects of Israel's prime minister.
Top American officials in the “national security” establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the world. During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist. Most people remember him, of course, as the whistleblower who exposed voluminous official lies about the Vietnam War by providing 7,000 top-secret pages of classified documents to the New York Times and other newspapers. But throughout his adult life, he was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war. One day in 1995, I called... Read more
Dear Eleven Adults Responsible for the Majority of Book Bans in Schools,
I’m sorry for that cold salutation. I don’t know all your names yet. But shout out to you, Jennifer Petersen. The Washington Post reported that you’re one of the eleven, working from Spotsylvania, which I imagined as a dark and misty town where dogs became vampires. My imagination got the best of me—I just love speculative fiction. Turns out, it’s a real place in Virginia.
If I’m being honest, I’ve been feeling more than a little overwhelmed with the state of our country lately. It feels like every day, something happens that makes me wonder whether I’ve stumbled right into the fifth dimension from A Wrinkle in Time and lost a couple of decades. I’m guessing you all know that book, since some of your schools have banned it.
What an unexpected pleasure it was to feel an actual jolt of joy when I read that the entire movement to ban books in US public schools is coming from fewer people than I fed this Thanksgiving. Thank god (do you have an issue with me saying “god”? Or “God”? I’m guessing no) it’s just eleven of you.
Rock crystal’s status stemmed from its rarity and its extraordinary beauty, made even more glorious through carving and polishing. But above all it was the stone’s unparalleled clarity that provoked wonder in those who beheld it.
The strength of Pan-Africanism today lies not in its failed ambitions for a united Africa, but in the wealth of curiosity about Black cultures which was present from the movement’s inception and lives on in the diaspora, enriched by the modest trickle of migrants from Africa and the Caribbean into the US.
The awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American world, perhaps because it thought itself already emancipated, has remained largely immune to the messianic allure of 1789.
The Hundred Years War created a sense of nationhood, especially in France. In England, the Anglo-Norman dialect died out, and though French was still part of the equipment of ladies and gentlemen, it was Parisian French they learned, and they learned it as a foreign tongue. In France, speaking English was enough to get your throat cut – because, after all, who spoke English except the English?
We had our shoes off and maybe this was a place where we were washing for gold, somewhat lost in the world.
In discussions of translation, we hear a lot about difficulty, impossibility, loss, riches, invention, triumph – all justified and interesting avenues. But texts may suggest something else: agreement, for example, or honourable hard work. In Proust’s case, when the topic is memory and chance, the convergences are remarkable.
Netflix has reversed the classical publishing strategy of throwing content at the wall of public indifference in the hope something will stick. It sees a scattered public whose attention can be pinned under a toppling wall of content.
Time passes more intensely in dreams. It is a Robert Louis Stevenson hallmark, the quicksilver evolution of thought and the fabular turn, the victory of original perception. He was born with what he later called an ‘internal theatre’, a mode of production that serves to make the dramas of the mind visible.
You can’t buy what Edinburgh has. You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as David Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces homogenisation, or worse, Disneyfication.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 1 (Friday 15 December 2023)
Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 1 (Friday 15 December 2023)
Contrary to the myth that from itsa founding document America was dedicated to capitalism, private property and the personal accumulation of wealth, ‘happiness’ in its 18th-century definition meant public – not private – wellbeing. Happiness was not a synonym for property.
The rocks individuated as peopleif you register peopleas individuals, which I do,haplessly, helplessly, when forced,fright or flight or love or _______.The plants need water.The rhododendrons are...
Wheatley’s writing was the supposed product of her leisure time rather than her enslaved labour. She imitated white aesthetics while drawing attention to her Blackness in ways that mixed humility with boldness. She was held up as a prodigy who merited exceptional liberation and as proof that all people had an inalienable right to freedom.
Teachers, classmates, relatives would remember Mansfield as ‘completely self-centred’, ‘careless’, ‘lazy’, ‘impatient’, ‘the last child in the world they ever expected to become a writer’, less sweet than her sisters, and less obliging. When she started writing stories, her family thought she was trying to show off.
You do walk through the world with some people. You don’t know anything about them, but you walk through the world; if they die, you do not get used to it.