David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry

Ruby Hamilton

David Lynch’sfilms seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field. ‘That’s why I...

 

In the Manosphere

Emily Witt

Last autumn, during a particularly enervating phase of the United States presidential election, it became clear that one of the themes of the campaign was going to be men. Never mind the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the demonisation of immigrants and the plans to put thousands of them in for-profit jails, the genocide in Gaza, climate change. The Democrats, according to the polls, had lost...

From the blog

Of Flags and Families

Helen Charman

9 September 2025

One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George’s Cross, is ‘Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners’. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and ‘foreign’ women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted.

From the archive

In the Shallow End

Conor Gearty

RobertReed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political...

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ambivalence

Gazelle Mba

In​ 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED talk called ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, which addressed the unflattering stereotype of Africans in Western media and literature – what she called a ‘single story’ of half-truths and ‘incomplete’ tales. Adichie’s account recalled Binyavanga Wainaina’s seminal essay...

 

Goodbye to Grangemouth

Ewan Gibbs

At the end​ of April, the fuel trading company Petroineos quietly announced that more than a century of oil refining at Grangemouth had ended. The manner of the refinery closure, which had been announced in November 2023, confirmed how peripheral the plant and its workforce were to the international petroleum business. Scotland remains a significant oil producer, but has no refining...

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Eugenics in Germany

Richard J. Evans

At ten past ten​ on the morning of 2 June 1948, Karl Brandt climbed on the black gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. An American military tribunal had sentenced him to death for crimes including ‘planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatised as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed and so on, by gas,...

 

On Shamanism

Mike Jay

On​ the remote island of Siberut off the west coast of Sumatra, the Mentawai have a well-documented tradition of shamans: individuals known as sikerei heal people by communing with spirits. Manvir Singh, in the middle of his doctoral research in human evolutionary biology, went there in 2014 to undertake fieldwork. Sikerei were easy to spot, with their long hair, loincloths, strings of beads...

 

Why we need Dorothy Parker

Kasia Boddy

Dorothy Parker​ dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines’. In...

 

Sturgeon comes out swinging

Dani Garavelli

Onthe afternoon of 14 August – the publication day of her memoir – Nicola Sturgeon was interviewed by Kirsty Wark in the McEwan Hall in Edinburgh. Sturgeon was wearing a red top and red shoes: she wears red on days she needs to feel in control. But the audience members didn’t want to tell her off, rather to thank her for ‘all you’ve done for Scotland’....

 

Radioactive Toothpaste

Malcolm Gaskill

There’sa scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of Radium to describe Dunthorne’s acerbic grandmother’s ‘fuzzy’ woollen jumper. Here, though, the blurring effect becomes a metaphor for our misty view...

Short Cuts

Why Juries Matter

Francis FitzGibbon

Juries decide​ the outcome of about 1 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales, and yet the jury system is permanently under threat. The latest threat comes in Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, which the government commissioned to deal with the ever growing backlog of cases in the Crown Court. Leveson suggests replacing the jury with a judge and two...

 

On Linton Kwesi Johnson

Mendez

Ifirst encountered​ Linton Kwesi Johnson on TV. My family was watching a rerun of his performance of ‘Inglan Is a Bitch’, which aired on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980. In a pork pie hat and dark glasses, Johnson delivered his poem about the Caribbean migrant experience of his parents’ generation in a rhythmic laid-back drawl:

well mi dhu day wok an mi dhu nite wokmi dhu...

 

Bukele’s Prison State

Tom Stevenson

For four decades​ El Salvador was known for death squads and civil war, and then for gang violence. But now, under President Nayib Bukele, the gangs that carved up the country have been routed. The members of the pandillas – the two main gangs were Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (split into two factions, the Revolucionarios and Sureños) – have been imprisoned or...

Diary

Out Birding

Oliver Whang

The summer​ after my first year at university, I worked in Panama as a research assistant for an evolutionary biologist. We were based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, which was formed in 1913 when the Chagres River was dammed to help make the Panama Canal. The buildings, clustered on the edge of the reservoir, house a few dozen rotating scientists and...

Close Readings 2025

On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. Catch up on our four series running in 2025: Conversations in Philosophy, Fiction and the Fantastic, Love and Death, and Novel Approaches. New episodes are released every Monday.

Read more about Close Readings 2025

LRB 45s

Were marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a limited edition series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, drawing on our rich archive of poems.

Volume 1 contains ‘Byron at Sixty-Five’, a typically inventive and witty dramatic monologue by Edwin Morgan; ‘Requiem for Mohammad al-Dura’, an elegy by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; and ‘To 2040’, the title poem from Jorie Graham’s latest collection.

Read more about LRB 45s
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