LRB blog

My mother rang to say that my father had called a water truck owner and offered to pay him to fill our jerry cans, but the man said his truck had broken down and the spare parts weren’t available. We had barely enough water to last the day. My mother asked me to find out if a water truck would be coming to a nearby camp so that I could fill our jerry cans there.

My boss at the bookshop has said he would sell AI novels if there were clear demand and clear labelling. We almost certainly already sell books that have made some use of LLMs in their production. Novels and short stories which are suspected to have been written by AI are being nominated for prestigious literary prizes. When I ask my customers if they would read a novel written by AI they either vehemently reject the idea or shrug. 

At the first interval in the Berlin Staatsoper’s new production of La Vestale, the man to my right turned to me and said: ‘Mein Gott, ist das dumm!’ A few minutes later I heard someone say to their companion in the foyer: ‘Just close your eyes and enjoy the music.’

Jordan Bardella was supposed to be a different kind of far-right French politician: young, technically savvy, a long way from the poisonous demagoguery and street fighting of the old Front National. Mediapart, the investigative news site, last month published some of Bardella’s Facebook Messenger correspondence from when he was an aspiring FN apparatchik in 2013. Leaked by former party colleagues, it included such conspiratorial claims as ‘the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them and rob them’ and ‘all the banks are owned by Jews.’ Since he denied writing the Facebook messages, rival politicians have joined other public figures in openly referring to Bardella as a liar as well as an antisemite. 

Lula raised the budget for school lunches, improved access to higher education and free medication, and increased the hiring of public health professionals by a third. He restarted public housing and community policing programmes, restricted access to firearms and provided debt relief. He created a new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and made advances towards participatory budgeting at the federal level. He removed Brazil from the UN Hunger Map and strengthened affirmative action measures for Afro-Brazilians in higher education. Should Flávio Bolsonaro become president, every one of these gains will be reversed, remaining state enterprises will be privatised, coup plotters will receive amnesties and the military will return to government.

Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. She first appeared in the London Review on the letters page in 1993. The first poems of hers we published, after the success of Autobiography of Red, were four from The Beauty of the Husband in 2000. Two or three contributions – usually though not always poems – have followed every year since, including ‘Ode to the Sublime by Monica Vitti’, ‘Euripides to the Audience’, ‘Wildly Constant’, ‘Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)’, ‘On Snow’, ‘What I Like about You, Baby’ and ‘In My Life as a Visiting Lecturer I Meet Various and Sundry People or, Another Way to Think of This, Here Are All the Novels I Never Wrote and You Are Welcome to Them’.