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This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government. Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity. This... Read more

Source: Duck! appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

What does Israel's current war against the Gaza Strip have to do with oil and gas? Since the year 2000, when Gaza's gas fields were discovered, the Israeli government has prevented the Palestinian people and their representatives from reaping the benefits of their own resources.

The post Israel’s Decades Old Plan to Exploit Gaza the Gas Fields of Gaza appeared first on MintPress News.

Oops he did it again A certain candidate for the presidency has scrambled a lot of names lately. He’s accused President Joe Biden of being so cognitively impaired that he would lead the U.S. into World War II. Totally ACED it! (Huffington Post): Donald Trump would like people to know he “ACED” a cognitive test, and that he totally knows who the current president of the United States is. The former president claimed in a Truth Social screed Monday morning that he’s been referring to former President Barack Obama as the sitting president “sarcastically,” to suggest that Obama is secretly calling the shots instead of President Joe Biden. […] “No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country. Also, and as reported, I just took a cognitive test as part of my Physical Exam, and ACED it,” Trump wrote. “Also ACED (a perfect score!) one taken while in the White House.” Sure he didn’t say Waffle House? Every accusation is a confession Popular Information on Thursday told the tale of one 20-year-old Lanah Burkhardt.

My favourite ever podcast, Literary Friction, is finishing after ten great years of monthly episodes interviewing authors and talking about books. I’d begun to guess something was up when, over the past few months, its hosts – Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt – remarked several times about how long they’d been going. Still, when they […]

One​ of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling us anything precise.

R.B. Kitaj’s bookishness wasn’t only a matter of literary references, which recur in his work; he also drew on the photographic reproductions that transformed art books during his lifetime, particularly those published by what he called the ‘old Jewish’ Phaidon Press.

Consent could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio tells Kate, with shrew-bashing relish, ‘your father hath consented/That you shall be my wife, your dowry ’greed on;/And, will you, nill you, I will marry you.’

The mop-haired Argentinian president, Javier Milei, has many well-known eccentricities. He claims to commune with his deceased dog through a spirit medium, and that four of the dogs he expensively cloned from the original pet offer him expert political and economic advice. But behind all this, there is a hard ideological core.

The Hutu authorities​ in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga writes in The Barefoot Woman, portrayed the Tutsi as ‘inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate’. Mukasonga’s literary project responds to this dehumanisation by reclaiming Tutsi life from the debris of Rwandan history.

American poets have never tired of the wonders of refrigeration. Ever since William Carlos Williams pilfered plums from the icebox there have been songs in praise of fridges and their contents – and why shouldn’t there be? Mary Ruefle’s poems make the most of such wonders.

This Other Eden is loosely based on what happened on Malaga Island, Maine in 1912, the same year that the first international congress on eugenics was held in London, at which Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, put forward ideas for ‘improving the breed of the race’ by eliminating inferior strains.

Monet was always more than just an eye. He was a painter of heart and brain, feeling and memory. Late in life, when working on his Water Lilies, he told his friend Gustave Geffroy: ‘They’re beyond the strength of an old man, but I want to succeed in rendering what I feel.’ 

In spite of various attempts to make Napoleon work as a biopic, the film doesn’t have a bio. It has a general of genius, something like a sports figure who is alive only in games or tournaments. 

Dear Pam,

Thank you for thinking of me and my son for the past eleven years as you and the rest of your firm’s staff gather around to add your signatures and nothing else to the non-denominational Costco holiday cards you send out every December.

The jolly gender-neutral snowperson last year? Classic yet updated for this LGBTQ-inclusive era. The bluebird perched on an icy pinecone the year before? Timeless. The masked gingerbread people in various colors holding hands around the earth on 2020’s greeting? A subtle yet vital nod to the social unrest of that tough pandemic year.

Truly, it means so much that you haven’t forgotten us after the ten months and $62,302 worth of your expertise and advocacy that resulted in a Parenting Plan that requires me to deliver my only child once a week to a man who once drank a bottle of Wild Turkey and then broke into my public school classroom at nine-thirty in the morning while I was teaching a lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird to eighth graders.

In his twenties and thirties, Aldus Manutius was an ordinary humanist. But then, at forty, he moved to Venice and reinvented himself as a publisher. Why did he do it? How did he become a printer so ambitious that he changed what reading meant?

In Indigenous Mesoamerica and Greater Amazonia, feeding someone – whether human or animal – expressed a duty of care. Once tamed, animals lived alongside humans in companionable relationships. The purpose of taming was not exploitation, but the giving and receiving of affection.

The structural jumps and awkward sutures of time in The Fraud are part of its argument. They give additional force to its wider project of showing how the novels of the period 1840-80 were structurally unable to represent the interdependence of the British aristocracy and the slave trade.

By​ 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To...

Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and excellent citizens’, as Eric Williams put it. They founded charitable schools, hospitals, orphanages and libraries, making them ‘the leading humanitarians of their age’.

The defeat of The Voice leaves Aboriginal culture stuck in the same queasy relationship to the white nation and its essentially European notion of history that it has been in since the early 20th century, when serious efforts to acknowledge Indigenous culture began. The result is a mixture of conservation, invented tradition and misunderstanding.

When​ Yevonde made the new case for colour in photography, she also made the case for women behind the camera, controlling the views. Who better to advance the art and push colour into a black and white world than those who wore red lipstick and scarlet nail polish?

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 24 (Friday 01 December 2023)

It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through moral repugnance at the creation of the West German army and through the appearance of active ‘atonement’ movements, the way opened to wider empathies. ‘By the 1990s, German responsibility for the Holocaust had become a civil religion that defined national identity.’

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 24 (Friday 01 December 2023)