A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle

T.J. Clark

‘Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That’. It knows we know what it refers to. But...

 

Solidarity Economy

Susan Pedersen

Book titles​ are like city buses: they bunch up and arrive in packs. When historians were obsessed with identity, collective nouns proliferated: Citizens (1989), Britons (1992), Commoners (1993), Aristocrats (1994). Foucault prompted genealogies of ‘isms’: orientalism, internationalism, imperialism, globalism, neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb...

 

Savarkar’s Nationalism

Raghu Karnad

Ihid​ the covers of the books I read about Savarkar for this piece. I wanted to be able to read in public without worrying about the judgment of strangers; without looking like another affluent Hindu man being red-pilled into ancestral resentments. I was wary of being seen reading about Savarkar and wary of writing about him. The former might upset anyone who saw me; the latter might upset...

From the blog

Everyone has their reasons

Jan-Werner Müller

17 January 2025

The speed with which former opponents of Trump are adapting to his re-election and displaying anticipatory obedience has been greater than anyone could have, well, anticipated. Prominent examples include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and congressional Democrats who seem to think that performing bipartisanship by loudly declaring their willingness to work with Trump might somehow be rewarded.

From the archive

Guns across the Border

Rachel Nolan

There are​ only two gun stores in Mexico. Throughout the enormous country, which takes three full days to cross by car from top to bottom if you don’t stop, the only places you can legally buy a gun are a shop on a military base in the capital and a shop on another military base in the large northern city of Monterrey. It’s not advisable to drive straight through Mexico any more,...

 

Among the Mystics

Patricia Lockwood

Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black...

Give your mind a good stretch

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Diary

Remembering Nan Shepherd

Fraser MacDonald

In the months​ following my parents’ deaths, I decided to buy a flatbed scanner as a partial fix for the drifts of paper they had accumulated after sixty years in the same house – receipts, letters, photographs, notes and diaries. I found that scanning their old 35mm slides kept their absence at bay. Scanning is a robotic task. Stretch the marquee tool. Preview the image. Select...

 

Balzac’s Places

Raymond N. MacKenzie

In​ 1842, with eight highly productive years of writing still ahead of him, Balzac wrote a preface to his Comédie humaine, which already comprised dozens of books. He defended the morality of the work, and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no...

 

On Elfriede Jelinek

Becca Rothfeld

Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’. This is a polite way of saying...

 

Candy Says

Nicole Flattery

Candy Darling​, the transgender actress and Warhol superstar, was born in Queens in 1944 and grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island. She was raised as Jimmy Slattery – named after her father, a gambler and alcoholic who worked as a cashier for the New York Racing Association. As Cynthia Carr writes in her biography, Darling broke with her Jimmy identity early: ‘She was always...

 

Reagan’s Make-Believe

Jackson Lears

Afew days​ after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold...

 

Tales from Hoffmann

Polly Dickson

Having reached​ a point in his career when he could swat away the advances made by editors of literary magazines, E.T.A. Hoffmann asked a particularly demanding publisher to disabuse himself of the ‘unfortunate notion that I am suffering from a writer’s diarrhoea whereby, with every evacuation, some little story or novel makes its exit!’ In the same letter, written in...

 

Snobs, Swots and Hacks

Jonathan Parry

When we think​ of the fashions of the 1890s, several objects come to mind: the tennis racquet, the golfing cap, the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original

 

LA on Fire

Colm Tóibín

It was​ all sweetness verging on smugness. On the evening of Monday, 6 January we sat in the hot tub in the backyard and looked at the unfull moon. There were really only two small questions preoccupying me. Was that star actually Venus? And, also, was I wrong to feel slightly sad that the Christmas tree had finally been disentangled from its ornaments and was going into the garbage?

In the...

 

What energy transition?

Adam Tooze

Anyhope we have of containing the escalating climate crisis depends on getting to net zero, which will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions...

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s revolutionary thought of the 20th century, truth and lies in the ancient world, and satire.

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Partner Events, Winter 2024-Spring 2025

Check back for seasonal announcements, including Alternative Lessons and Carols, a special screening of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer at Regent Street Cinema, and a concert inspired by Edward Said’s ‘Thoughts on Late Style’.

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