FROM THE NEXT ISSUE
ELIOT WEINBERGERTen Typical Days in Trump’s America
Seeming to confirm President Trump’s mystifying and unprecedented animosity towards Canada (‘they’ve taken advantage of our Country for many years!’), hyper-aggressive Canadian green crabs are invading the coast of Maine, devouring softshell clams, oysters, nutritional eelgrass, lobsters (which they attack in groups), the more passive American green crabs – and each other, when there is nothing left to eat. One Canadian green crab can produce 175,000 eggs per year and their eradication is considered impossible. More
FROM THE LATEST ISSUE
Lynched for Drinking from a White Man’s Well
It is hard to escape the enormity of the crimes the Equal Justice Initiative documents, and for which no one was ever punished. All this narrative work has been carried out in the hope that the recognition of past wrongs and moral blindness will make those in the present not only recognise our complicity in this history but also the continuity of past and present. The black man lynched for ‘standing around’ in a white neighbourhood in 1892 or the man lynched after being accused of vagrancy in Garyville, Louisiana in 1917 ought to remind us of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old shot in 2012 in Sanford, Florida by a neighbourhood watch volunteer who thought he looked out of place in a white neighborhood, or of Eric Garner, choked and killed on Staten Island in 2014 by police who were arresting him for selling untaxed cigarettes. These are not lynchings but they are the offspring of the forces that sustained lynching and of an unequal criminal justice system. More
Husband Shopping in Beijing
At weekends public parks in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai function as matchmaking venues. Anxious parents put out advertisements for their single children – printed on sheets of paper or hung on boards – noting their age, appearance, height, salary and skills, while scouting around for suitable matches. Men should be equipped with a house or an apartment, a solid job and a decent salary; women should be young, good-looking, healthy, have a sweet/gentle/nice character, and some education but not too much (a BA would be adequate; an MA a bit too much; a PhD absolutely intimidating). More
For England and St George
Every myth has two facets, the story that is told to make events or states of being comprehensible to people, and the underlying events or states that provide the material for the myth; a stylised, simplified dramatisation of change, and the change that demands dramatisation. Reckless, hypocritical, deluded, mendacious and chauvinist as they are, the Brexiteers found a real set of circumstances, and misapplied a popular, off-the-shelf folk myth to it. By simply rejecting the Brexiteer myth, without offering another, better one, the Remainers appear to deny the underlying changes. More
At the British Museum
Rosemary Hill
Short Cuts
Francis FitzGibbon
Consider the Wombat
Katherine Rundell
