London Review of Books (LRB) – January 17, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Living With Keats’ – A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph; Congress vs Harvard; The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution, and more…
Looking back to September 1820, when things had gone badly wrong but not yet so grotesquely as to be visibly beyond repair, we can see how few and how poor Keats’s options were. Surely it was better that (in the absence of other volunteers) the young artist Joseph Severn agreed to travel with the dying poet to Rome that autumn than that he had refused.
Times Literary Supplement (January 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Power Failure’ – The retreat from net zero; Canon wars; The end of literary criticism; Empires imprint on the Middle East; Harvard and plagarism….
The New Yorker – January 22, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresPascal Campion’s “Winter Sun” – The artist depicts the beams of sunlight that flicker during the coldest months of the year.
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.
In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.
Times Literary Supplement (January 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Have a good trip’ – On the uses of psychedelic drugs; Hisham Matar’s novel of London exile; A West Bank tragedy; Puzzled by crosswords; French Band Aid, and more…
The New Yorker – January 15, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresBarry Blitt’s “Back to the Future” – The artist depicts a goose-stepping Donald Trump, determined to march back into political relevance.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
Times Literary Supplement (January 3, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Lady Vanishes’ – Muireann Maguire on a revival of classic crime fiction; What next for Julian Assange; David Hockney’s drawings; Dreaming up 007; The science of belonging and more…
The New York Review of Books (December 28, 2023) – The latest issue featuresBen Tarnoff on Elon Musk, Julian Bell on Peter Paul Rubens, Fintan O’Toole on the American gerontocracy, Anjum Hasan on recent Sri Lankan fiction, Matthew Desmond on America’s Covid-era experiment with a social safety net, Francine Prose on a vampiric celluloid Pinochet, James Gleick on the science of free will, Frances Wilson on Tove Jansson and the Moomintrolls, Álvaro Enrique on indigenous Americans in Europe, Katie Trumpener on Alexander Kluge, two poems by Jack Underwood, and more.
Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control over our actions, of continual decision-making—is part of the experience of being human, moment by moment and day by day. True, we sometimes just drift, like robots or zombies, but at other times we gird our loins and exert our will. David Hume defined will nearly three centuries ago as “the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind.” The feeling was universal then and it’s universal now.
The New Yorker – January 1 & 8, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresBianca Bagnarelli’s “Deadline” – The artist evokes a moment suspended between the old and the new.
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
London Review of Books (LRB) – December 20, 2023: The latest issue features Stevenson in Edinburgh; Katherine Mansfield’s Lies; James Meek changes the channel, and Israel and Germany…
Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television by Peter Biskind
Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation
Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany by Esra Özyürek
Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust by Andrew Port
America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life by Claire Rydell Arcenas
Times Literary Supplement (December 20, 2023): The latest issue features ‘A nice little earner’ – On Dicken’s Christmas Carol; Jane Austen’s Truth Universally Acknowledged; Between God and Jingle Bells; and ‘Revoltingly Cute’…
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