When Adolescence was released on Netflix last month, it was pegged as an incisive inquiry into the manosphere and the ways that misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate are poisoning the minds of young boys. In fact the series is quite light on that, beyond parsing some red pill emojis and making a few references to podcasts. Should all under-sixteens be banned from smartphones and social media? The proposal is fervently discussed even though it’s obviously unworkable.
On 1 April, the memorial site at the former Buchenwald concentration camp announced that the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm would no longer be speaking at the eightieth anniversary commemoration of the camp’s liberation. Boehm was disinvited because of pressure from the Israeli embassy. How did the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor become the object of such a campaign by the Israeli government?
El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) opened in 2023. It has capacity for up to forty thousand prisoners, although is said to be only half full. CECOT was built to incarcerate members of violent gangs, who by 2015 had made El Salvador the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country. Dispensing with warrants and court hearings, in 2022 the government jailed almost 2 per cent of the population, many on the basis only of their tattoos. The official murder rate fell from 18 per day to one every three days. In early February, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, toured Central American capitals. In San Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the ‘world’s coolest dictator’, offered to make his prisons available, for a fee, to hold ‘criminal’ migrants deported from the US.
Barbara Everett, who died on Friday, 4 April at the age of 92, was for many years a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her books include Poets in Their Time and Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. She published editions of Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as writing many influential essays on the plays. Among her subjects in the LRB have been Shakespeare’s romances, the Sonnets, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure and Falstaff.
Last Wednesday, 2 April, Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’, marked a new departure. There’s not even a pretence at playing by the rules anymore. This was a carnival of trade discrimination: open, delirious, triumphant. The husk of the WTO system, chewed up for decades by termites of all shapes and sizes, has been whacked with a large hammer. It is unlikely to be replaced by an orderly transition to geopolitically aligned trading blocs. Some of the United States’ closest allies are now being hit with the biggest tariffs.
Free movement is a foundational right of EU citizens. When expelling a citizen of another member state on the grounds of public security (the other possible grounds are public health and public policy), the expelling state must show that the citizen represents ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’. This is, or should be, a very high bar. A Polish citizen, Kasia Wlaszczyk, and two Irish citizens, Roberta Murray and Shane O’Brien, currently living in Berlin, have been ordered to leave Germany by 21 April or be deported, along with Cooper Longbottom, an American holding a student visa. All are active in the Palestine solidarity movement. None has any criminal convictions.
The 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck central Myanmar on 28 March, followed minutes later by one almost as big, was the strongest in over a century. It sent multistorey buildings across Mandalay and nearby towns crashing to the ground, and caused devastation as far away as Bangkok, six hundred miles to the south. More than three thousand people have been confirmed dead in Myanmar, and unknown numbers are still missing. In Bangkok, rescuers continue to pull people from the rubble of a collapsed skyscraper.