Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog and presents the paper’s podcast. He has been writing for the LRB since 1999, when he was an editorial assistant. Many of his pieces have been Short Cuts. Most of the others have been on contemporary fiction, though he has also written on Romantic poetry, the ancient Greeks and Romans, the climate crisis and Italian politics. He has lived in Italy since 2006. Game Theory, a novel, was published in 2018.
On 7 August 1991, the Albanian ship Vlora docked at the Port of Durrës, twenty miles west of Tirana, with a cargo of Cuban sugar. Thousands of people, desperate to leave Albania in the first throes of its 'transition' from communism, boarded the ship and prevailed on the captain to take them to Italy. The Vlora arrived in Bari the next day. According to a Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe report from January 1992:
Hossein Derakhshan, a leading Iranian blogger, was imprisoned in Tehran in 2008 for spreading propaganda against the ruling establishment, promoting counter-revolutionary groups and insulting Islamic thought and religious figures. He was pardoned and released last November. He recently wrote a piece about the ways the internet changed – for the worse, in his view – during his time inside. 'Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online.' The web is dying, to be replaced by the stream:
'If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive... For the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.' Peter Singer's (famous, and much disputed) contention in 'Famine, Affluence and Morality' (1972) may have acquired a new, literal force this week with the widespread dissemination of images of the drowned corpse of a three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach. The pictures don't alter Singer's argument one way or the other, but reduce the perceived distance between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.
An elderly couple have been murdered in their home in Palagonia, a town of 16,500 people near Catania. The police have arrested an 18-year-old suspect, who was caught with the victims' phone, computer and bloody trousers on his person. He says he found them under a tree. The crime was probably gruesome enough to have made headlines for its sensation value alone: both corpses were naked; the woman was thrown from a balcony. There were no signs of forced entry on the doors or windows of their apartment. But it's still in the news because the suspect, an Ivorian national, arrived in Sicily by boat on 8 June.
Am I the last person to have noticed this subcategory in WHSmith bookshops? There must be people who head straight for it to grab the latest Cathy Glass, but it had passed me by, or I'd passed it by, until this weekend. I puzzled for a while over the upside-down face – I think it's Billy Connolly – then went off to see what they had on the shelves under Comic Death Stories.
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how...
In ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them....
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.
Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South’ – hazardous waste...
Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers operated or grew up in America’s Pacific Northwest. Caroline Fraser’s book Murderland, reviewed...
One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and...
‘The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how...
As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26’, as the New York Times put it in 1912, following...
Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and increasingly to tech firms such as Space X and Palantir....
Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered...
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814...
In this episode of the LRB podcast, Neal Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary...
Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey David Graeber's work, from the theories of power he developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything...
‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s...
Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left...
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