Reading

Created
Wed, 13/03/2024 - 00:32

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America. Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan. America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming... Read more

Created
Wed, 13/03/2024 - 00:00
“Journalists seem bored by the biggest story of our lifetimes” Donald “91 Counts” Trump hopes to be reelected president so he can prevent himself from facing justice. Meanwhile, he misuses the justice system’s very due-process features intended to prevent an innocent person from being wrongly convicted to stave off facing a jury of his peers, journalist Mark Jacob tells Greg Sargent. “These are not the actions of an innocent man,” says Jacob, criticizing the press for whitewashing this as politics as usual. Sargent writes: Over the weekend, The New York Times published a news analysis titled, “The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same.” This has become a constant refrain in the press: One of the candidates is running on an explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the press keeps calling this a “rematch” of 2020, almost as if it’s all a sporting event.  Trump “wants to be a fascist dictator of the United States,” and the press treats it like old news, Jacob complains.
Created
Wed, 13/03/2024 - 00:00

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Masters of the Nefarious is a cult classic comic by the pseudonymous French artist Pierre La Police. It’s being published for the first time in English by New York Review Comics in a translation from the French by Luke Burns.

In this excerpt from the book, Chris, Montgomery, and Fongor, the paranormal investigators known as the Masters of the Nefarious, arrive on an island they believe may hold the key to solving their latest case. Can our heroes follow the clues without getting sidetracked?

Created
Tue, 12/03/2024 - 23:00

When I set out to create my award-winning prestige drama The Family, I wanted to test the boundaries of what television could be. I already knew I wanted to push the envelope by hinting at incest, having every other word of dialogue be “fuck,” and showing a character die in a gruesome manner five minutes into the first episode. Yet this didn’t feel like enough. That’s when I realized that I shouldn’t just push the envelope; I needed to flush the envelope down the toilet.

The Family was inspired by three literary masterpieces: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and Tarō Gomi’s quintessential contribution to the canon, Everyone Poops. Some critics have called the bathroom scenes in my masterpiece “gratuitous” and “weirdly and unnecessarily recurring.” But my characters are human. They cry when they are hurt, they bleed when they are cut, and they need to evacuate their bowels after eating a big burrito. By shoehorning toilet-themed tableaux into every episode of The Family, I am representing the beauty and depravity of the human experience.

Created
Tue, 12/03/2024 - 21:28

The rich and powerful tradition of anti-racist struggles against white power structures in the Caribbean is something the Windrush generation — people like my grandfather, and the community around him — brought with them when they migrated to Britain after World War Two. When they arrived, many of those communities found a political home in […]

Created
Tue, 12/03/2024 - 20:00
David Rule and Iain de Weymarn Technologies such as distributed ledgers create the possibility of new forms of digital money, whether privately-issued ‘stable coins’, tokenised commercial bank deposits, or central bank digital currencies. Authorities are considering a world where digital money circulates alongside existing forms of money. In the past, the nature of money has often changed. Prior … Continue reading New money, old money
Created
Tue, 12/03/2024 - 11:23
Mary Kostakidis and Quentin Dempster explore the Australian mainstream media’s blind eyes on the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza. This vodcast was recorded on March 11 2024 following the referral of the Australian Government to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice’s conditional ruling on South Africa’s submitted evidence of IDF Continue reading »
Created
Tue, 12/03/2024 - 09:00
Trump’s ally Orban spells out Trump’s Ukraine plan Not that we didn’t know this was his plan to “end the war in 24 hours,” but it’s now been confirmed. He will hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and leave Europe to its own devices: Donald Trump will totally stop funding Ukraine if he wins the U.S. election in November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said following a meeting between the right-wing figureheads. “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told Hungarian state media Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” The longtime allies met last Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, a summit which was lambasted by U.S. President Joe Biden.