‘Iwatched it literally like I was watching a television show,’ Donald Trump said of the US military assault on Venezuela in the early hours of 3 January. After months of covert operations and surveillance, US forces bombed several sites around Caracas to cripple Venezuelan air defences and then kidnapped the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia...
The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that pass for congressional scrutiny these days; Marco Rubio has stuck especially closely to the line that this is not a war. But the larger implication of calling such interventions ‘policing’ is that it enables the administration to depict everything from drone strikes to full-blown invasions as matters of law enforcement rather than warfare.
The tulip bubble is the most famous financial bubble in history, but as historical examples go it is also, in one crucial respect, misleading. That’s because anyone can see the flagrant irrationality which was at work. At peak tulip madness in 1637, rare bulbs were so expensive that a single one was worth as much as a fancy canalside house in Amsterdam. You don’t have to be...
Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in circular patterns, propping up turnover and valuations. Colossal amounts of money are pouring in. Is it a bubble? Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.
The unconscious is back. Why now? Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people that has cost Israel a measure of its international legitimacy and led to the prolonged captivity and death of hostages, increased antisemitism and an exodus of...
What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere.
The language and conduct of Israel’s unceasing war against Gaza suggests that there is something more than the rational interests of a nation-state at play. The sheer extent of the carnage hints at a pleasure in destruction, not to speak of a drive towards absolute victory which is bound to be self-defeating. However shattered the force of Hamas, however long it takes the...
Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate guilt, the more it entrenches itself, bringing the wrath of the gods, so to speak, down on your head: guilt is tenacious or it is nothing.
This piece was written before Iran imposed an internet blackout on 8 January.
Six months ago I thought about buying a car, for reasons not of convenience but of necessity. My income as a freelance university lecturer in Iran barely pays for my daily commute. I thought I could drive at night for the ride‑hailing service Snapp! to cover my living expenses. I had enough savings to buy a hatchback Saipa Quik – but then its price went up 66 per cent.
This piece was written before Iran imposed an internet blackout on 8 January.
Six months ago I thought about buying a car, for reasons not of convenience but of necessity. My income as a freelance university lecturer in Iran barely pays for my daily commute. I thought I could drive at night for the ride‑hailing service Snapp! to cover my living expenses. I had enough savings to buy a hatchback Saipa Quik – but then its price went up 66 per cent.
Disko bay was dotted with small icebergs as I left the cottage I was renting in a small town in western Greenland one grey Sunday morning in early March. I sank up to my knees, having failed to work out where the safe path up the hill to the road was under the snow. People say the icebergs aren’t as big as they used to be. Somebody showed me a picture of Ilulissat from the 1990s, a...
Greenland has considerable powers to run its own affairs and on paper Greenlanders have the same rights within the Danish Realm (Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands) as any Dane. But the immediate effect of Trump’s menaces was to highlight the paradox of Denmark defending Greenland’s freedom, when it is Denmark’s ownership of Greenland that makes the country unfree in the eyes of many Greenlanders.
On 9 February this year, Elon Musk, then in charge of the US Department of Government Efficiency, posted a message on X calling for a number of American media outlets to be closed down. He criticised, among others, the public service broadcaster Voice of America, which began transmission in 1942 with ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. ‘Daily, at this time,’ the...
Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book Public Opinion, published in 1922. The book posits that modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’.
Long before Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, many Iraqis suspected that foreign intelligence services were manipulating their country’s domestic affairs. Since the 1920s – when Gertrude Bell manoeuvred behind the scenes in the early days of the Iraqi state under the British mandate – otherwise inexplicable events were often attributed to the workings of ‘Abu Naji’,...
For his part, Saddam Hussein believed that the CIA knew full well his weapons store was empty – which meant he was the subject of yet another conspiracy. Experience had taught him that was usually the case, and he was right.
The Misery Index, a crude measure of economic discomfort, was thought up by Arthur Okun, a neo-Keynesian who chaired Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1960s. Okun’s formula simply added together the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. A good Misery Index might be about 5 (2 per cent inflation and 3 per cent unemployment); Britain’s...
Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the basis of its appeal.
‘If only one could write! After that, perhaps one could think,’ Gaston Bachelard writes in The Flame of a Candle, published in 1961, a year before his death. He is picturing himself at his desk, waiting in vain for the ability to write to return, for the solitude of the blank page to end. There were too many times, he says, when thinking he was thinking (‘croyant...
Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which? I suppose the answer depends on how we feel once we have accepted the invitation.
When Samuel Pepys, wifeless and childless, died in 1703, the pride of his life – three thousand books, lavishly gilded and bound in brown leather – passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had once been a student. The college had scarcely any record of him apart from a reprimand for ‘having been scandalously overseen in drink’, but that no longer mattered....
Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper. Into his diary’s pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called ‘one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history’) to sex.
The alchemist in his laboratory was a popular subject for Dutch painters of the 17th century because it allowed them to show off their skill with light. Mattheus van Helmont’s A Savant in His Cabinet, Surrounded by Chemical and Other Apparatus, Examining a Flask (1670s), one of the splendid plates in Philip Ball’s introduction to alchemy, depicts an alchemist at work,...
Chemical reactions reflect human dramas, which reflect celestial movements, which reflect the mind of the divine. The alchemist’s lab work and the philosophy were inextricable: working with material substances was a sacred endeavour, because matter and spirit were modalities of the same substance.
In his History of Great Britain, published in 1653, Arthur Wilson wrote: ‘I see no reason why princes (towering in the height of their own power) should think themselves so far above ordinary mortals, that their actions are to be incomprehensible. This is but a weakness, contracted in the high place they look down from.’ The execution of Charles I in Whitehall in 1649 prompted...
Above all, Jackson presents James as a ‘king of words’. No king before or since has written so thoughtfully about the nature of kingship. His ‘manual on kingcraft’, Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s Gift’), became a bestseller. He could swear like a sailor, but coined new words – Anglican, anorexia, Highlander – and is quoted more than 650 times in the OED.
Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned excelebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.‘
‘You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.’ At first I thought the cable was a joke of some sort. It might just as well have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial.
Marble kouros (c.590-80 BCE).
For young men, all things are as they should be when they are in the brilliant flowering of their youth, an object of admiration for men and desire for women, and beautiful in death in the front rank.
Tyrtaeus, ‘Fragment 7’
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a...
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a room to come, framed in a tall narrow door. Light hits the sculpture from the left – light from the east, strong and steady. And always, whether it’s years or days since the last time I stood here, it is the colour of the stone that takes me by surprise. Surely before it wasn’t this pink!
To try to make sense of the recent US military operation to capture the president and first lady of Venezuela, Chinese netizens have been looking . . .
This piece was written before Iran imposed an internet blackout on 8 January.Six months ago I thought about buying a car, for reasons not of . . .
Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another . . .
Edward George’s exhibition Black Atlas, at the Warburg Institute until the end of January 2026, operates in the tradition of Aby Warburg’s . . .
One of the early meanings of ‘original’ was something which serves as a model, or something from which copies can be made: at the heart . . .
The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the West Papua National Liberation Army’s . . .
Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock music that took over indie . . .
The annual World Conker Championships take place every October in the grounds of the Shuckburgh Arms, a pub in rural Northamptonshire. The 2024 . . .
‘Follow the money.’ That was George W. Bush’s directive to the US Treasury after 9/11. Choking off al-Qaida’s finances proved complicated — but what happened next went far beyond that. A small team of Treasury bureaucrats weaponised the global economic system itself, and built a financial nuclear bomb.
Archive in this episode:Indictment of Islamic Charity...
‘Follow the money.’ That was George W. Bush’s directive to the US Treasury after 9/11. Choking off al-Qaida’s finances proved complicated — but what happened next...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’
On this episode of the podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions...
Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued...
Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to...
Throughout 2026, a bonus series of Close Readings episodes, some of them live, will occasionally pop up in this feed. In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them.
For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha,...
Throughout 2026, a bonus series of Close Readings episodes, some of them live, will occasionally pop up in this feed. In The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine...
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi Sunak’s government, the crossings of ‘small boats’ over the English Channel and the use of ‘asylum hotels’ have become a focal point for protest, violence and escalating rhetoric,...
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment, Camus became a journalist in Algiers and planned his writing career around three concepts based on the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus and Nemesis, a scheme that he never finished.
Jonathan Rée...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment,...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843,...
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...
On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works.
Listen to our four new series running in 2026: Narrative Poems, Nature in Crisis, London Revisited and Who’s afraid of realism? plus a free bonus series, The Man Behind the Curtain.
This year’s Winter Lectures include Amia Srinivasan on politics and psychoanalysis (12 December), Adam Shatz on ideas of America (16 January) and Seamus Perry on pluralism and the modern poet (30 January).
View details of each lecture and buy tickets here.
In the next issue, which will be dated 22 January, David Runciman on Kamala Harris; Thomas Meaney on William F. Buckley; Colm Tóibín on Yeats, Auden and Eliot.
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