AI Doomerism

Paul Taylor

Latelast year, Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk in front of an invited audience after the Bletchley Park summit on AI safety. He asked Musk what impact AI would have on the labour market, and tried to steer him towards a reassuring answer: AI wouldn’t take away people’s jobs but would create new ones – and politicians like Sunak could help by creating an incredible...

 

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra

In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Hunt’s Mendacity

James Butler

Section​ 114 notices used to be rare. They’re described as council bankruptcies: when a local authority is on the verge of making unlawful expenditure – that is, spending more than its income – its chief financial officer is required to issue a notice and the council starts, inevitably, to cut its services further and sell off assets. Central government often sends its men...

 

Homage to Brigid Brophy

Lucie Elven

It’seasy to imagine Brigid Brophy at London Zoo, making notes on the animals. I can see her by Berthold Lubetkin’s disused elliptical Penguin Pool or watching the apes. Two of them

used the full extent of the cage as a cubic area: their chases went also up and down, and up and down diagonally. Sometimes they shewed boredom, the consequence of play, and would fret for a moment;...

 

After Waco

Richard Beck

Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in...

 

Medieval Magic

Tom Johnson

In​ the Wellcome Collection, there is a 15th-century parchment roll that works as a kind of holy tape measure. Unfurled to its fullest extent, the manuscript gauges the combined height of Jesus and the Virgin Mary: about three and a half metres if they were standing one on top of the other. On the dorse is a text promising that whoever carries ‘thys mesure’ around with them...

Think Differently

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On British and Irish Architecture

Rosemary Hill

The England​ of 1530 lives deep in the national imagination. It was a landscape of timber-framed manor houses, castles, small towns and villages, spires and towers. At about 2.6 million the population was still in recovery from the Black Death and half what it had been in 1300, but there was a general air of prosperity. London, always an exception, was densely packed with houses whose...

From the archive

What’s left of John Soane

Mary Beard

Tombs do not rank high in the history of modern architecture. Only two grave monuments in London have been designated as Grade One Listed Buildings: the icon of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched between the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the mainline railway and St Pancras Coroner’s Court. ‘Listing’ has done little to protect either monument. Predictably perhaps, Marx’s tomb has suffered over the years from the hammers and spray guns of both enemies and friends. But Soane’s has fared even worse; not, I imagine, at the hands of desperate architectural ideologues, but from run-of-the-mill vandals, attracted by its sheer oddity. When I visited it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely destination); and the temporary metal fence surrounding it was more of an eyesore than a protection.’‘

From the archive

The Lure of the Unexplained

Hilary Mantel

What an enticing prospect: A-Z elucidation, or at least the admission in print that most of life’s pressing questions are never answered. But won’t all the entries begin with ‘W’? Where has youth gone? Why dost thou lash that whore? Why are you looking at me like that? And of course the question that trails us from playgroup to dementia ward: well, if you will go on like that, what else did you expect? But of course we’re not dealing with that kind of unexplained. The clue is on the cover: a person with popping eyes, flying through the air. This dictionary’s greatest fans will be people more interested in the exception than the rule, and often, it must be said, ignorant of what the rule is.

 

Precision Warfare

Andrew Cockburn

On​ 24 January, US Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East and West Asia, issued a press release reporting that the USS Gravely, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, had shot down two missiles fired by Yemeni Houthis at a US-owned container ship, the MV Maersk Detroit, in the Gulf of Aden. A third Houthi missile had landed in the sea. There was no damage to...

Diary

The Bussolengo Letters

Malcolm Gaskill

Cambridge​ in the autumn of 1989 seemed to me a lonely place. I had just taken up that loneliest of occupations, doctoral research in the humanities: three years of self-exile in libraries and archives, hard-up and haunted by doubt. My girlfriend had gone to study in Russia, and I’d never felt more isolated or adrift. Every morning I’d cycle to my college and sit in the ancient...

 

The Mandelas

Stephen Smith

Imade​ my first trip to South Africa towards the end of 1988. I had just become the Africa editor of Libération after years as a regional correspondent in West Africa. I went to visit Emmanuel Lafont, a French Catholic priest who was one of the very few white people living in the vast black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of...

At the Serpentine

On Barbara Kruger

Jo Applin

Since​ 1977 Barbara Kruger has explored the relationship between politics and power in text and image-based works that surprise, exhort, instruct, plead, insist, cajole and otherwise boss us about. In addition to her familiar wall-mounted billboards and projections on show at the current Serpentine retrospective (until 17 March), sound installations dotted about the gallery repeat stock...

 

Galen v. Gym Bros

Claire Hall

Galen​ couldn’t stand gym bros. They were so occupied in the business of ‘amassing flesh’, he said, that they paid no attention to their souls, which were ‘smothered in a heap of mire’. Lucian, Galen’s contemporary, agreed. One of his short satires shows Hermes refusing to let a famous local beefcake called Damasius across the Styx to the underworld:...

At the Movies

‘American Fiction’

Michael Wood

Percival Everett’s​ brilliant novel The Trees (2021) offers a heady mixture of comedy and horror. The depiction of race, crime and policing in the American South is too parodic to be true, and too true to be only a parody. His earlier work Erasure (2001) took us to the same territory, although not so far south, and with more precarious modes of balance. Some of the comedy was...

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s Adam Shatz with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards on revolutionary thought of the 20th century, Thomas Jones and Emily Wilson on truth and lies in Greek and Roman literature and Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell on satire. Listen to all three series for just £4.99 a month or £49.99 for the year.

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LRB Winter Lectures 2024

Buy tickets here for this year's Winter Lectures at St James Church, Clerkenwell: Pankaj Mishra on the Shoah after Gaza, Hazel V. Carby on decolonising history and Terry Eagleton on the origins of culture.

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