Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.
A still from ‘Black Atlas’ by Edward George, from the ‘Image of the Black’ archive, Warburg Institute
Edward George’s exhibition Black Atlas, at the Warburg Institute until the end of January 2026, operates in the tradition of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas.
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 of originality is the potential for duplication. Rousseau says he was cast from a mould, like a pot on a production line, but the mould has been broken so there can’t be any more copies.
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 fighting capacity, but they still often face Indonesian jets and missiles armed only with bows and arrows. The activist Tom Beanal, who died in 2023, once asked if West Papua was colonised by Indonesia or by the entire world. Munitions recovered in Kiwirok include Serbian mortars, Chinese drones and bombs manufactured by the French arms company Thales.
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 charts, and critics’ chatter, from about 1989 to 1992. Mid-tempo, meditative, sometimes earsplittingly loud but emotionally subdued, shoegaze offered fuzzy, layered guitar lines with smoky, blurred timbres; tremolo bars, odd tunings and effects pedals; reverb-heavy, warbling vocals, sung by fey men and (less often) confident women. It was invented in Dublin and London by My Bloody Valentine on Isn’t Anything(1988) and Loveless (1991), and played beautifully by (among others) Ride, Swervedriver and Lush.
The annual World Conker Championships take place every October in the grounds of the Shuckburgh Arms, a pub in rural Northamptonshire. The 2024 event was overshadowed by cheating allegations, which helped make this year’s competition – the sixtieth anniversary games – the biggest that anyone could remember.
Narges Mohammadi, who was jailed in November 2021 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, was punched in the chest by an Evin guard during a protest in August 2024. She was released on medical leave a few months later, though forbidden from leaving Iran or seeing her twin children. She was detained again last week at a memorial for Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer, who was found dead in his office. ‘The only machine that’s working for the regime is repression,’ she told me a few weeks ago.