The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness
By Ian Buruma
Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.
On the dangers of American hubris by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne
From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia.
I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched her back, and took a long piss. My axe hung in the sky. The cat stared at me, tail up. I put my axe down and squatted before her. I hitched my gown to my waist.
What is the sound of quiet quitting?
Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work.
A personal history of anxiety
I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, flesh comes off the bones—what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night.
The New Review (April 2, 2023) – How running helped me navigate the strange terrain of grief An extract from @drrachelhewitt’s memoir, In Her Nature @ChattoBooks.
An actor returns to Palestine and joins a local production of Hamlet in this richly layered and elegant examination of memories and oppression
The West Bank town of Jenin: ‘what could offer a more febrile union of the personal and the political than Palestine?’ Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images
How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying and love the calm
The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9.
The science of the perfect second
When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the “time lady”—an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out—who would announce, with prim authority “at the tone,” the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time.
Is Willmoore Kendall’s constitutional morality still possible?
Cyrus should be counted among history’s greatest men.
Lamenting the death of the
The Drift Magazine – February 28, 2023 Issue – We called it heterosexual oppression. Like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch.
Through a growing focus on healthcare monitoring in recent years, Apple has positioned its wearables as essential accessories for the technophile and the casual hypochondriac alike.
Like so many other predictions of collapse, exaggerated. Methylphenidate for Miriam. Two executives showed up for a meeting dressed as Woody and Buzz Lightyear. A source of revolutionary Marxist critiques, an outright conservative, a peddler of flimsy conspiracy theories. Some days I am so filled with myself I can see nothing. I am not going to apologize for the empire, for our history. Bravissima! Stealth, he kept no socials. She had martini-glass tits. In this city every boy is an isotope. Enter among the truly civilized peoples. Cruising for difference. The body of a bear, the nose of an elephant, the paws of a tiger, the tail of an ox, and needle-like hairs. Wainscoting for an all-knowing liberalism. How can a narrow regional tabloid claim itself The World? The surrealist didn’t prescribe life-sized butter ears. Spend how you want the sixtyish years you have left of your life.
“Italian language teaching is back in Somalia!” the Italian embassy in Somalia tweeted in late September 2021, announcing a new program at the Somali National University that would reintroduce the language of the country’s former colonizer.
The New York Times Magazine – February 5, 2023:
Hot flashes, sleeplessness, pain during sex: For some of menopause’s worst symptoms, there’s an established treatment. Why aren’t more women offered it?
Fani Willis’s aggressive tactics have sparked criticism — and won over voters. What do they tell us about how she might prosecute the former president?
Sturgeon are disappearing from North American rivers where they thrived for millions of years. And the quest to save them is exposing the limits of the Endangered Species Act.
The Guardian Weekly (February 3, 2023) – In the trenches of eastern Ukraine, much of the conflict with Russia has been frozen for several months now. But, as the northern winter moves on, that could be about to change. The initial invasion has been followed by a period of attrition, and a third phase of the war now appears imminent.
Military activity along parts of the front is increasing and it is assumed that, sooner or later, one side will try to break the deadlock. The question, as Julian Borger writes this week for the Guardian Weekly magazine’s big story, is who will strike first and where?
As Julian explains, it is likely to be “an all-out battle for decisive advantage using combined arms … to overcome fixed positions. Europe has witnessed nothing of its sort since the second world war.”
That’s not to say there aren’t signs of anxiety among Ukraine’s regional allies, though. Germany’s decision last week to send its Leopard tanks to Ukraine may yet prove critical in the coming battle, but as German journalist Jan-Philipp Hein points out, Berlin’s military support for Kyiv remains far from wholehearted.
In the UK, the sacking of Nadhim Zahawi as Tory chairman over an undeclared tax dispute while he was the chancellor (and thus in charge of tax collection) kept the pressure on prime minister Rishi Sunak, political editor Pippa Crerar reports; while in Opinion, Nesrine Malik says the episode reveals much about Britain’s networks of power and influence.
The Guardian Weekly – January 27, 2023 Issue:
It’s an age-old question: how should nations around the world adjust to their elderly societies? Japan has faced such realities for a while now, but the challenges are becoming increasingly common across the developed world where families are getting smaller, and people are living longer.
Even India – which will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country – is now seeing an older demographic become more prevalent in some states. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, look most likely to enjoy the benefits of a younger population as the century progresses. For the Guardian Weekly magazine’s big story this week, Emma Graham-Harrison and Justin McCurry assess what ageing populations hold in store for the world. And Verna Yu reports on the reasons why many young people in China seem reluctant to start families.
Boomers Daily 