In the state’s midterms—which could determine the balance of the Senate and the integrity of the Presidential race in 2024—Democrats are fighting for the vote. Republicans are fighting to undermine it.
As the head of General Electric, he fired people in vast numbers and turned the manufacturing behemoth into a financial house of cards. Why was he so revered?
This week’s @TheTLS , featuring Helen Vendler on Matthew Hollis’s biography of The Waste Land; Vernon Bogdanor on the UK’s future; Christopher Priest on Terry Pratchett; Felipe Fernández-Armesto on lying; @irinibus on the creative potential of constraints – and more.
Charles Glass – Although World War Three had come perilously close, Martin Indyk absolves Henry Kissinger: Soviet actions were ‘yet again characterised by an ultimate timidity in the face of American resolve’. ‘Resolve’ is one way of describing the risk of nuclear Armageddon. Another is ‘recklessness’.
Susan Pedersen – The problem with individual conscientious objection is that we are mutually dependent whether we acknowledge it or not. You may refuse to get vaccinated on grounds of conscience but will benefit from herd immunity if others do; you may refuse to pay taxes but will still get your rubbish collected; you may refuse to take up arms in war but will be protected from harm if others serve.
James Meek – If an innocuous merchant ship passing through the Baltic or the North Sea had a handful of ordinary, secretly armed trucks lashed to its deck, would any Nato country notice? Would the drones be detected or intercepted? If they were launched and hit their targets, could it ever be proven where they originated? As a threat to Europe, this is creative licence. But using swarms of Shahed-136s and other forms of missile to destroy a country’s energy system, on the eve of winter, is exactly what Russia is doing to Ukraine.
A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.
Sergio García Sánchez’s “Old Haunts”
The artist discussed Día de todos los santos and taking inspiration from the Old Masters.
This week’s issue of the TLS, featuring @George_Berridge , Claire Lowdon and Edmund Gordon on new books by Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver and George Saunders, respectively; Gabriel Josipovici on Cézanne; @15thcgossipgirl on Chaucer’s innocence; @rinireg on hatred – and more.
Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden Administration has provided valuable intelligence and increasingly powerful weaponry—a risky choice that has paid off in the battle against Putin.
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.
American prisons are often unjust, inhumane, and ineffective at protecting public safety. Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore believe they should be eliminated entirely.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba, edited by Tamara K. Nopper and with a foreword by Naomi Murakawa
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano
Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.
The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1,001 Nights translated from the Arabic by Yasmine Seale, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paulo Lemos Horta
The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.
No Bears a film written and directed by Jafar Panahi
A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.
Henry James decried the nineteenth century’s “loose baggy monsters,” but a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” demonstrates the genre’s power.
Boomers Daily 