In September, I invited people to record themselves reading a short passage from an English translation of Rousseau’s Confessions:
I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.
The sense of his own uniqueness that Rousseau describes here is something that everyone feels. He is an individual set apart from what he calls the ‘numberless legion’, but he also speaks for everyone. Being different from one another is something we have in common. One of the early meanings of ‘original’ was something which serves as a model, or something from which copies can be made: at the heart of originality is the potential for duplication. Rousseau says he was cast from a mould, like a pot on a production line, but the mould has been broken so there can’t be any more copies.
The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the West Papua National Liberation Army’s fighting capacity, but they still often face Indonesian jets and missiles armed only with bows and arrows. The activist Tom Beanal, who died in 2023, once asked if West Papua was colonised by Indonesia or by the entire world. Munitions recovered in Kiwirok include Serbian mortars, Chinese drones and bombs manufactured by the French arms company Thales.
Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock music that took over indie charts, and critics’ chatter, from about 1989 to 1992. Mid-tempo, meditative, sometimes earsplittingly loud but emotionally subdued, shoegaze offered fuzzy, layered guitar lines with smoky, blurred timbres; tremolo bars, odd tunings and effects pedals; reverb-heavy, warbling vocals, sung by fey men and (less often) confident women. It was invented in Dublin and London by My Bloody Valentine on Isn’t Anything(1988) and Loveless (1991), and played beautifully by (among others) Ride, Swervedriver and Lush.
The annual World Conker Championships take place every October in the grounds of the Shuckburgh Arms, a pub in rural Northamptonshire. The 2024 event was overshadowed by cheating allegations, which helped make this year’s competition – the sixtieth anniversary games – the biggest that anyone could remember.
Narges Mohammadi, who was jailed in November 2021 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, was punched in the chest by an Evin guard during a protest in August 2024. She was released on medical leave a few months later, though forbidden from leaving Iran or seeing her twin children. She was detained again last week at a memorial for Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer, who was found dead in his office. ‘The only machine that’s working for the regime is repression,’ she told me a few weeks ago.
I enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza in 2022. As I started my second year, I hoped I would do well enough to get a scholarship to spend the second semester as an exchange student at a university abroad. A few weeks later war broke out. Everything in Gaza came to a halt; education was suspended at all institutions. We began to live from one day to the next, never knowing what the next day would bring. With the borders closed, the only way to leave Gaza was by paying a fixer $5000 or more per person, an impossible amount for my family. Our home was destroyed. We moved into a tent in a camp where I knew no one.
Police violence against demonstrators isn’t new. What is distinct in the Palestine case, however, is the consistent and cumulative use of almost weekly violence for more than two years, in service of a cause central to the German state. The Berlin government has repeatedly shown its willingness to break the law to suppress Palestine activism.