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Candidate as an adjective—was this the newest lingo, something a copy editor like me should know about?

I’ve got a few new articles out in the usual mags. Over at UnHerd I’ve written about Donald Tusk’s victory in Sunday’s Polish elections and its momentous consequences — for Poland, the EU and NATO. Long story short: it’s clearly a big win for pro-EU forces, but attempts to use the result to justify a new integrationist power …

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I’ve written for UnHerd about Africa’s revolt against Western-dictated Net Zero policies, and how these threaten to lock the world’s poorest countries into perpetual underdevelopment.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was like the folkloric figure of Mélusine, woman above and fish or serpent from the waist down, though she normally managed to conceal that trait.

If Antifa is anti-fascist…. “Weird how this keeps happening and it keeps being Republicans,” Brian Beutler tweeted this morning on X in reference to Douglass Mackey (Politico): A right-wing social media influencer was sentenced to seven months in federal prison on Wednesday for spreading falsehoods via Twitter, now known as X, in an effort to suppress Democratic turnout in the 2016 presidential election. Douglass Mackey, who posted under the alias Ricky Vaughn, was convicted in March of the charge of conspiracy against rights after a trial in federal court in Brooklyn. Prosecutors said Mackey, who had 58,000 Twitter followers, conspired with others between September and November of 2016 to post falsely that supporters of Democrat Hillary Clinton could vote for her by text message or social media post. For example, they said, Mackey tweeted a photo of a woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” the tweet said.

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.

‘When women are marginalised, enslaved and silenced, very few men will be capable of any form of kindness,’ Emily Wilson remarks. It is no small thing for Homer to have noticed.

However the conflict ends, with or without Hamas in power (and I bet on the former), Israel won’t be able to avoid negotiating over the exchange of prisoners. For Hamas, the starting point will be the six thousand Palestinians currently in Israeli prisons, many of them held in administrative detention without trial.

Even before he died, I avoided telling people I knew David Foster Wallace. If they knew who he was, they wanted to know details about him. I became a secondary character, as women often are. 

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.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 21 (Friday 20 October 2023)

Leaflet drops informed people that because of the actions their leaders had taken, or because there were insurgents hiding among them, they should immediately leave a proscribed area. Continuous air strikes then prevented people from returning until the government’s demands were met, effectively blockading them from their own homes and livelihoods. Casualties were viewed as the responsibility of the victims, who were considered to have been amply warned.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 21 (Friday 20 October 2023)

For Teju Cole’s protagonist in Tremor, as for many of us, the public reassessment of history has been accompanied by a private reckoning. It isn’t only the external world that has been revealed to be ersatz; there is also the queasy acknowledgment of the ideology that was operating on us as children reading, say, a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel.

A Gathering of Lozhkyhanging from the edge of a teacupsugar-coated   under the shadowof a dusty samovaror a wedding giftsilver & resting on a bride’s lipspromising wealth ...

The question of the Roma’s origins became more significant as the medieval social order gave way to modernising, territorially defined states. Individuals were no longer simply assigned a place in a feudal hierarchy. Instead, legal status was increasingly dependent on proving one’s origins, both in terms of genealogy and geography. 

On a personal level, the kinds of thing we laugh at reveal the truth about us as individuals. On a national level, the kinds of thing we laugh at reveal the truth about us as a country. This seems to apply to Britain more than most countries.

I wanted to be in Lorrie Moore world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle America, usually with disappointed middle-class lives, underwhelming husbands and dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. None of that mattered – because they were witty, always having conversations I wished I was part of. 

Crypto is an ideology, an anti-government, individualistic belief system, one that Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t really share. He was a trader, and he saw in crypto a big unaddressed market with a lot of inefficiency: in plain English, he was a fox looking at a henhouse. 

Eisenman produces weird imagery with technical expertise, but she doesn’t trade in the off-kilter strangeness, say, of Neo Rauch, and steers clear of Surrealism or the more extreme apocalyptic atmospherics of Daniel Richter. Her concerns are historical, even when she is painting a genre scene.

London was a city that loved to snack: a Venetian visitor wrote in 1618 that ‘between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats.’ But while buying from hawkers could be a source of treats to leaven a relatively boring diet, it could also be good household management.

Yes, there was Care Not Killing at one end and Dignity in Dying at the other. Yes, an actual guide dog was in attendance, at a tactful distance from Cats Protection. But the bigger presences were Google and Sainsbury’s and the free fruit and bottled water at the Intuit Small Business Hub.

Before the strike, the country was characterised by comparative egalitarianism, the (relative) power and legitimacy of organised labour, and an industrial economy in which state industries played a prominent role. After it, economic inequality skyrocketed and the trade unions were delegitimised.