March 2025

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested early in the morning of Wednesday, 19 March, on two charges – one related to corruption and the other to terrorism. He released a video of himself shortly before the arrest, talking to the camera while nonchalantly adjusting his tie. ‘Hundreds of police officers have arrived at my door,’ he said. ‘I entrust myself to the people.’ The previous day, his diploma in business administration from Istanbul University was nullified, supposedly because of irregularities in his transfer from a private university in Northern Cyprus in 1990. More to the point, someone without a university degree cannot run for president.

France is the most visited country in the world, with over 100 million tourists a year. To welcome the merry hordes, property owners have converted vast amounts of housing into holiday rentals. There are more than 800,000 such listings in France; Paris alone has 60,000. Finding a place to rent to live in is a lot harder. Last year, France passed an ‘anti-Airbnb law’ that cuts tax breaks for holiday rentals and gives more powers to local authorities to regulate short-term lets and put quotas on tourist accommodation.

Last month, the Rwanda-backed March 23 Movement set up shadow administrations in key areas it has conquered in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels are closer to taking full control of the region’s minerals, especially its coltan reserves, which according to UN observers at the end of last year were providing them with $800,000 a month. 

There’s nothing surprising about Trump’s attack on the universities, or on the liberal law firms that he also despises. What is shocking is the ease with which his attack has so far succeeded. Like the academics and politicians in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, American college administrators and lawyers are responding to Trump’s bullying as if it were an opportunity to carry out ‘reforms’ – and as if they were secretly relieved that their hand has been forced by the Leader. This is a tale not so much of capitulation to an authoritarian leader as of collusion with him.

Tom Lowenstein, the poet and ethnographer, died on 21 March. His fieldwork in an Iñupiaq village in north-west Alaska began in the 1970s and resulted in seven books. Some were orthodox monographs; others, including Ancient Land, Sacred Whale and The Structure of Days Out used a combination of verse and prose (as well as personal observation) to take the measure of a complex society dealing with the onrush of modernity. His last piece for the LRB was a verse ‘conversation’ with Murasaki Shikibu, the 11th-century author of The Tale of Genji.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead was just over five feet tall and had to stand on a suitcase to be seen above the lectern when she delivered her 1967 keynote address to the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped (now the Office of Disability Employment Policy) in Washington DC. Mead began her lecture by referring to archaeologists’ observations of a healed fracture in an ancient human skeleton, noting that this is the point in hominid evolution at which ‘we know we are approaching what we regard as true humanity.’ It takes time and respite for bones to heal; a body that lived beyond a break is evidence of people taking on extra burdens to feed and tend those who were ill or disabled. In a Green Paper published earlier this week, the Labour Party unveiled its plans to cut five billion pounds from the budget for health and disability benefits.

I woke up yesterday morning to a message from a friend in Karachi. It just said: ‘They’ve started again.’ I did not wonder who ‘they’ were. He could only have been referring to Israel. And I knew what they must have started again: mass killing in Gaza. The fact that he had sent me a message meant the bombing had to be much heavier than it had been for the weeks since the 20 January ceasefire. I sent a message to my friend Marwa in Gaza to see if she was OK. ‘Hamdulillah we are fine.’ Only then did I check the news.

On 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy collapsed at the renovated railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, killing fifteen people and severely injuring two more. Three weeks later, as students and academics at Belgrade’s Faculty of Dramatic Arts held a silent vigil for the victims, they were attacked by a group of masked men. Last week I spoke with Vanja Šević, a 22-year-old graduate student at the university. ‘The response has been way bigger than we thought,’ she told me. ‘It is a fight for justice. The message is that we can’t tolerate this any more.’ 

In the spring of 1942 Dr Lennox Johnston, a Merseyside GP, took the train to London, intending to pluck Winston Churchill’s cigar from his lips and stamp it out. The anti-smoking campaigner, frustrated by his failure to convince the medical establishment to take his cause seriously, felt that a strong public protest was needed. Arriving in the capital he first paid a visit to Sylvia Pankhurst for advice about being arrested, finding her ‘both intrigued and approving of his project’.

It would be a mistake to see the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil for his political views in relation to Palestine as an authoritarian aberration on the part of the Trump administration. In reality, it marks the latest episode in a long-running saga of state repression of political speech in support of Palestinian rights on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nigeria already struggles with inadequate healthcare funding. This year’s budget allocates only 5.18 per cent of the total (2.48 trillion naira) to health – which is up from 1.23 trillion naira last year but still far below the 15 per cent target set by the Abuja Declaration in 2001. Without USAID, an already fragile system is weakened. This crisis forces a cruel reckoning: what happens when a nation accustomed to foreign aid is left to fend for itself? The abrupt withdrawal has revived debates among development economists. Critics argue that foreign aid fosters dependency and corruption, enriching elites while leaving ordinary citizens in poverty.

Schneewittchen, a film by Stanley Schtinter based on a text by Robert Walser, opens with a shot of a man in black lying in a field of snow, supine, one arm thrown out. The scene emulates photographs taken on Christmas Day 1956, when Walser left the asylum where he had spent 23 years to go for a walk, never to return. The images have inspired many reconstructions. The one in Schneewittchen has the director playing the writer. Not everyone who came to the film’s UK premiere at the BFI last month realised that Schtinter was in it.

Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), ‘the “forgotten plague” was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.’

The British brought the system of administrative detention to Palestine when they were the mandatory power. The rules also authorised military courts, restriction of movement, censorship, the expropriation and demolition of houses, arbitrary searches and curfews, and were used by the British against both Palestinians and immigrants of Jewish and other religious backgrounds. Despite many of its founders being caught on the wrong side of these laws, Israel adopted them in 1948 and has strenuously resisted attempts to modify their provisions.

On Sunday, 9 March, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will be collaborating on an evening of music and readings inspired by Edward Said’s last, posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.