Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog, and presents the LRB podcast, from Orvieto.
There’s always a darker question lurking behind the one about whether or not robots can be people, and it isn’t about robots but about people, and what it means when they – when we – treat others as if they weren’t human.
On 17 February, Bloomberg reported that perhaps as many as fifteen million people in Texas had lost electricity, in ‘undoubtedly the largest forced blackout in US history’. There had been 21 confirmed deaths – some from carbon monoxide poisoning, as families tried to use their cars to warm their houses – and the final toll is likely to be higher. ‘I don’t...
Ihave a theory – more of a hunch, really – that to be a real football fan you have to commit to a team by the age of six, or eight at the latest. Unlike my friends whose fathers took them to watch Aldershot’s Fourth Division tussles on Saturday afternoons, I don’t remember watching a football match before the 1986 Mexico World Cup, when I was already nine and a half....
It must have seemed like the end of the world, and for thousands of people it was. The Younger Pliny was 17 when he witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. He described it many years later in two letters to Tacitus, who had asked him for an account of his uncle’s death. The Elder Pliny, now best known for his encyclopedic Naturalis Historia and for dying under the volcano, was...
The Abbey of Santa Maria di Falleri, a 12th-century Cistercian monastery about thirty miles north of Rome, has crumbled over the centuries into disrepair. It makes a brief appearance as a medieval palace in the classic comedy L’armata Brancaleone (1966). The roof was restored a few years ago, and the abbey can now be visited – Covid-19 permitting – on Saturday and Sunday...
Azadeh Moaveni talks to Tom about the situation on the Polish border, where women and children fleeing Ukraine face numerous dangers, including kidnapping, trafficking and forced labour.
Andrew O’Hagan talks to Tom about the power of defunct objects, from the life-enhancing gadgets of his childhood to Seamus Heaney’s fax machine, and the role lost things play in fiction.
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talks to Tom about how events in the 1960s, including the Aberfan disaster and a shift in strategy by the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, helped pave the way for devolution...
James Meek talks to Tom about the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the fall of Yanukovych to the wars in the Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh, and considers what may happen next.
Tom Stevenson talks to Thomas Jones about the situation in Ukraine, the effectiveness of some of the weapons in use, from anti-tank missiles to economic sanctions, and the risk of nuclear escalation.
Jeremy Harding talks to Tom about the long and resilient reign of King Hassan II of Morocco, and its repressive measures, as described in a new book by Aziz BineBine, who suffered 18 years of brutal detention...
Rivka Galchen talks to Tom about two recent books on the history of vaccine opposition and reluctance, from smallpox to covid, including the role of 'Big Supplement' and the effectiveness of mandates.
Laleh Khalili talks to Tom about the mythology of covert military operatives, through romance novels, self-help books and, more recently, the business guru, in the form of retired US army general Stanley...
John Lanchester and Rupert Beale talk to Tom about the spread of the latest variant, where we might stand in the story of Covid, and the failures of the state in coping with the pandemic.
Clair Wills talks to Tom about Netherne psychiatric hospital, where her mother and grandparents worked, and which became a national centre for art therapy. Wills asks how asylums such as Netherne – ‘total...
Tom talks to Charles Nicholl about the craze in the 1590s for plays representing recent, real-life murders on the London stage.
Rosemary Hill talks to Thomas Jones about the painter John Craxton: why he wasn’t a romantic, why he wasn’t interested in being famous, and his relationship with Lucian Freud, who very much was.
David Runciman talks to Thomas Jones about Silicon Valley’s best known investor-provocateur, his prescience, his mistakes, and why, despite his ultra-libertarian ideology, he owes so much to the state.
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