I’ve been home only once since Christmas 2019. Home with a capital ‘H’ is the North-East of England, where I grew up and where my parents still live. The government’s most unambiguous message during Covid – ‘Stay at Home’ – contains, for a lot of people, an ambiguity: staying at home has often meant staying away from Home. In truth, I’m...
Voters in the North ‘chose’ the Tories, but it wasn’t a free choice, just as my leaving the North wasn’t a free choice. These are choices conditioned by circumstances, dictated by government policies as much as by market forces (not that there is always a difference). Making a choice doesn’t mean you’re in control. Darlington might be better off than it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s as well off as it might have been.
We are nearing the point of really understanding the nervous system of the stomach of a crustacean – but we aren’t there yet. At the same time, technologies exist that allow paralysed patients to move robotic arms with their thoughts. It feels at once like the year 1900 and the year 3000.
Descartes thought the brain functioned as a system of hydraulics, much like the statues he saw in the gardens of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Later thinkers also saw in the brain what they saw around them: electricity, or magnetism, or Boolean logic, or Bayesian logic, or computers that question us about our mothers. Androids do dream of electric sheep. What’s remarkable is that our body of knowledge grows out of these dreams, albeit erratically.
Lucille Clifton developed an intensely economical style: short lines, sparse punctuation, ordinary language whose modesty is stressed by its lack of capitals. Her poems seem simple, but build unpredictably towards flashpoints of revelation. She twists the material of daily life into what Toni Morrison called ‘re-memory’, the clamour of history in the present.
Poetry can be a radical act of naming and misnaming, of bringing to light the awkward correlations between objects and words. Audre Lorde described it as ‘the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought’. Clifton’s reason for ‘the making of poems’ – ‘though I fail and fail/in the giving of true names’ – is that ‘I am adam and his mother/ and these failures are my job.’ This failure is categorically different from the misnaming that’s symptomatic of racism.
‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Paul Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ If 21st-century America needed an enemy, China was one candidate. On foreign policy, Krugman is perhaps best described as a left patriot. Where he had once downplayed the impact of Chinese imports on the US economy, he now declared that China’s currency policy was America’s enemy: by manipulating its exchange rate Beijing was dumping exports on America. But to Krugman’s frustration Obama never turned the pivot towards Asia into a concerted economic strategy. You might argue that in Covid we have found an enemy of precisely the kind Krugman was imagining. As far as Europe is concerned, an alien space invasion isn’t an implausible model for Covid. This novel threat broke down inhibitions in Berlin, and the Eurozone’s response was far more ambitious than it was after 2008. But America isn’t the Eurozone. For all Krugman’s gloom, it didn’t take a new world war to flip the economic policy switch.
‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Paul Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ You might argue that in Covid we have found an enemy of precisely the kind Krugman was imagining. As far as Europe is concerned, an alien space invasion isn’t an implausible model for Covid. This novel threat broke down inhibitions in Berlin, and the Eurozone’s response was far more ambitious than it was after 2008. But America isn’t the Eurozone. For all Krugman’s gloom, it didn’t take a new world war to flip the economic policy switch. All it took was an election.
The doctor who first urged his colleagues to ‘do no harm’, and also instructed them, less memorably, to ‘observe all concretions of excreta’, was a pioneering Greek practitioner of the fifth century BCE. We don’t know much about him, not even his name, but the writings he left behind helped lay the foundations of Greek medical science. He was probably a...
Doctors today speak not only of a Hippocratic oath but a Hippocratic face (distorted by the approach of death), a Hippocratic bench (used for setting broken bones) and a Hippocratic manoeuvre (for popping dislocated arms back into shoulder sockets). Yet the man himself is known only from scattered remarks by Plato and later authors.
This morning I watched a video of some ducks eating lettuce from an enamel bowl. The text of the newspaper lining their cage indicated the birds were in Japan. They devoured the lettuce ferociously, producing an eerie, rattling sound. The lettuce evaporated in a matter of seconds. Nothing about my description explains why the video is interesting, or why it was shared around the world and...
Patricia Lockwood is a generous writer. She seems incapable of resentment and has a Rabelaisian appreciation for the bawdy. She can describe America’s corporate restaurant chains and their blooming onions without a quantum of snobbishness. The twinkle in her eye contains the flash of an AR-15 and the gold leaf of Mar-a-Lago and the rays of a monstrance and the rhinestone of a Juicy Couture sweatsuit.
At the start of the First World War, 12-year-old Tom Harris moved with his family to a semi-derelict mansion on the outskirts of Leicester. Struggling at school and with few friends, he built a world for himself from its garden, a museum of pressed plants and tree samples. He established a fernery – complete with grotto – and spent evenings ‘skeletonising’ dead...
This world of pattern and texture, which Tom Harris spent his career tracing, is as natural to humans as it is to plants. We can find it by rubbing our eyes, in the phosphenes flashing against our eyelids, and in the fractal patterns of our fingerprints.
In 2016, Theresa May told the Conservative Party Conference: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’ This characterisation was not – rightly not – considered antisemitic, merely an appeal to the autochthonic Brexiter mentality. But it taps...
In the 1930s many of the elite Jewish families donated their houses and collections to the French state. It was as if they were saying: we are French, and we leave our greatest treasures to France. But to their enemies, this was no more than the deathbed repentance of thieves feeling guilty about their swag.
A certain style of comedy video has become prominent on social media over the past year. A young actor plays a generic, bumbling or morally compromised . . .
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...
Irina Dumitrescu talks to Thomas Jones about female authorship in early medieval England, and how the power and freedom that (some) women had in the eighth century challenges the idea of linear social progress.
Irina Dumitrescu talks to Thomas Jones about female authorship in early medieval England, and how the power and freedom that (some) women had in the eighth century challenges the idea of linear...
As part of a series about the future of the Union, David and Helen talk to Dan Wincott of Cardiff Law School about the history of Welsh devolution and the possibility of Welsh independence.
As part of a series about the future of the Union, David and Helen talk to Dan Wincott of Cardiff Law School about the history of Welsh devolution and the possibility of Welsh independence.
John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about his experience of being on a cargo ship blocked from entering the Suez Canal in 1967, his subsequent journey round the Cape of Good Hope, and the modern-day business of containers.
Image shows the Benvalla, which John travelled on in 1967.
John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about his experience of being on a cargo ship blocked from entering the Suez Canal in 1967, his subsequent journey round the Cape of Good Hope, and the...
Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death...
Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades...
Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of...
Given what we know about the future of the planet, Meehan Crist asks: is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us?
Akihito, who abdicated in April, was a paradoxical figure: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right. Richard Lloyd Parry considers the former emperor’s part in the intellectual and political debate over Japan’s wartime record, and its...
Akihito, who abdicated in April, was a paradoxical figure: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against...
The line between making a fiction and telling a lie has been blurry at least since Homer, and liars – from Odysseus and Iago to Austen’s Wickham and beyond – have often played central parts within fictions. This lecture will aim to tell some (though not all) of the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction from Homer to Ian McEwan, and will ask if fiction has...
The line between making a fiction and telling a lie has been blurry at least since Homer, and liars – from Odysseus and Iago to Austen’s Wickham and beyond – have often played...
Turn the second series of David Runciman’s acclaimed talks on the most important thinkers and ideas behind modern politics into your own personal masterclass, while bolstering your bookshelves with some of the foundational works of political theory and philosophy!
Rediscover classic pieces, recurring themes, and the dash the London Review of Books has cut through the history of ideas, for the past 40 years, with LRB Collections and now LRB Selections: two new series of collectible books.
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