It’s tempting to think of Past Lives, Celine Song’s haunting (and haunted) first film, as a work in search of a story. In the end, though, it’s exactly the reverse. The story...
Reading
Questions about the kinds of word that were and were not suitable for inclusion were a perennial source of conflict between James Murray and the volunteers who had professional status in a particular field. James Dixon, a retired surgeon living in Surrey, vetoed the inclusion of ‘appendicitis’ because it was, he thought, a nonsense word.
It’s not hard to praise Brown’s ‘bravura brushwork’ and to point out the art-historical precedents and motifs. What’s more difficult is to define her work’s relation to our own carnality, to the opulence and squalor of our daily lives.
Charles Lamb could not ‘digest’ death, but he gorged on life. Food, for Lamb, was a medium of thought, a master metaphor. The solitude of childhood was the ‘feeder of love, and silence, and admiration’.
The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can win an Algerian-style liberation war. The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba, is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens.
‘Medieval people’, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities’. Fifteen centuries of waiting for the end made time an existential problem: how to describe it, how to measure it, how to use it?
Under British Columbia’s decriminalisation pilot, launched in January this year and due to run until 2026, anyone found with under 2.5 grams of opioids, cocaine, methamphetamines or MDMA won’t be prosecuted. But selling drugs is still a crime.
We are to condemn or approve, and that makes sense, but is that all that is ethically required of us? In fact, I do condemn without qualification the violence committed by Hamas. This was a terrifying and revolting massacre. That was my primary reaction, and it endures. But there are other reactions as well.
Lauren Bacall was young, but she looked and sounded ancient in her wisdom – and she seemed to be teaching Humphrey Bogart how to relax. They fell in love, which was surely real, but it was the show business formula too.
St Jude’sThe clinked latch woke meinside the tower. Past midnight,and outside, voices … the stretchof headlights across the rafters,a dozen rooks asleep in a braceof echoes. Hollow,...
Only when a dictatorship actually attacked the Church and distanced itself from Christianity did it alienate the papacy, but even the actions of Hitler’s Germany in this direction were insufficient to bestir Pius XII. The pope’s main concern was always to preserve the interests of the Church as an institution: its property, its assets, its prerogatives.
Most young people in Nigeria regard military rule as an aberration and find it hard to understand why it appears to be popular in other West African states. But in the quarter-century since we swapped khaki for agbada, the percentage of Nigerians living in extreme poverty has only grown, while half the population is under eighteen.
If le Carré saw that the secret services on both sides of the Cold War had a shared interest in keeping hostilities simmering, Mick Herron gets similar mileage from the idea of the enemy within: not in the sense of a mole working for a foreign power, or the way Margaret Thatcher thought of the miners, but of conflicts between ambitious actors struggling for supremacy at one government agency or another.
What Republicans did and what it really means A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill have no use for Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and the seven others from the Republican caucus whose votes the other day sank Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. MAGA reactionaries lobbing grenades at Democrats is one thing. Lobbing them into the Republican caucus is quite another. As predicted, Republicans are trying to pin McCarthy’s ouster on Democrats. Reality check: It was Gaetz’s resolution. His alone. For reasons including his initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Biden and his reversal on condemning Donald Trump for precipitating a violent insurrection, Democrats saw no benefit in bailing out McCarthy. Now comes the aftermath. Giving McCarthy the boot is not a good look either for Republicans or for the U.S.A. as a whole. After a quick review of the week’s events and Donald Trump’s “burn-the-house-down” antics at his New York trial, Peter Baker (take with a grain of salt) writes that the foundations of our democracy appear shaky both to scholars and average Americans. Also, foreign adversaries are watching closely: Robert M.
In North America, Camus looked for Europe and failed to find it; in South America, he looked for Algeria, and although he didn’t exactly find it, he discovered something both familiar and strange: a version of the chasm between self and environment that he defined as ‘the absurd’.
You can read Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss as a set of Russian dolls, each containing a different debate about trauma. Small doll: Om’s conversations with Flavia, in which the sex therapist parrots pop-psychology jargon while Flavia bullishly denies that her past might have some bearing on the here and now.
The best adjectives for Bruno Schulz’s stories are not so much intellectual as sensual. They’re sticky, fuzzy and so richly textured that they seem almost rotten. The stories move in such a private and self-sufficient way that they seem to leave no room for interpretation. It isn’t immediately clear how Schulz expects a reader to make contact.
DeSantis has sought to impose a far-right, Christian nationalist vision. His ‘war on woke’ has targeted educational institutions and teachers, who are accused of ‘indoctrinating’ children with left-wing ideologies. While such policies are not unique to Florida, under DeSantis they have extended to criminalising those who oppose them and asserting unprecedented powers in the name of ‘freedom’.
The Republic of Artsakh has gone, but what was it? From the perspective of Azerbaijan’s government, and probably that of international law, Artsakh was an illegal entity. In Armenia it was held up as a critical part of the modern Armenian state, to be defended on that basis and because of the obvious desire of the population now living there not to be ruled by Azerbaijan.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 20 (Friday 06 October 2023)
Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most Israelis have seemed to believe that the current system could bring them lasting safety. That bubble has now burst. But the Palestinians are now the objects of the wrath of an Israeli government prepared to destroy Gaza and, if possible, expel its population.
by Dave Rollo
Think about the county where you live. Picture your favorite streets, event spaces, scenery, or terrain. If you’ve lived there awhile, chances are you know what makes it great: the natural, cultural, and commercial places whose characteristics make your community special to you and your neighbors.
Your connection to them becomes part of your sense of place. You delight in taking visiting family and friends to these special sites and you lament changes that threaten or despoil them.
The post What Makes a County Great? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
“A new personal finance trend has TikTok users recommending humorous new ways to rethink their spending habits. We’ve all justified unnecessary purchases before, but now social media has labeled the habit as ‘girl math.’” — CBS News
- - -
US Government Math
If you run out of money, print more.
Hollywood CEO Math
If you spend $50 million on one film starring Timothée Chalamet and use AI to replicate his likeness in perpetuity, you really spent only one dollar per hair flip. If you use AI to write the movies, too, they’re practically free, and you can buy yourself a bigger yacht.
Crypto Bro Math
The more dates you spend mansplaining how crypto works, the more your DoucheCoin is worth.
Airlines Math
If your flight is delayed five hours, you owe us an extra two hundred dollars.
As a parent, my mornings are spent trying to appease my children’s finicky and inconsistent food preferences, digging mashed, soggy Cheerios out of carpeting, and overriding the time controls on the kids’ tablets over and over again as my wife and I attempt to eke out a moment of rest. Don’t get me wrong, I love my children. But I miss easing into the day. I miss brunch. Mornings overflowing with bellinis and mimosas. Avocado toast. Dining al fresco at a hip downtown restaurant. Soaking up the laughter of my friends and the rays of a soft spring sun. Not feeling guilty for drinking before noon. Not worrying if the day will come to a crashing halt because a child finds an errant onion in their omelet or suddenly realizes, for no reason at all, that they need a Band-Aid.