The internet hasn’t so much changed people’s relationship to news as altered their self-awareness in the act of reading it. Before, we were isolated recipients of the news; now, we are self-consciously members of groups reacting to news in shared ways.
In the spring of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’
In the event of No Deal, MPs will have to pass between eight hundred and a thousand new statutory instruments through Parliament in a matter of days.
The marriage market in China is a horror show. The short window for a woman to find a husband is between 22 (fresh out of college) and 27 – after that you become a ‘leftover lady’, meaning you’re too old for an ‘ideal match’.
The psychedelic medical breakthrough has become a news staple: psilocybin for end-of-life care, magic mushrooms for OCD, ketamine for depression, ecstasy for PTSD, ayahuasca for addiction.
Diane Williams reads her stories ‘With this New Greasiness’ and ‘I’m Sure I Love and I Really’.
Under Netanyahu, Israel has run up a substantial bill in blood and tears. Unlike his wife’s credit card, it will eventually have to be paid.
My eye falls on a blog headlined ‘Macron is restoring France’s dignity.’ What sort of polity is it that needs to have its dignity restored so frequently? Is not the quest for grandeur insisted on by de Gaulle likely only to perpetuate a sense of always falling short?
The roadto Raqqa, once the de facto Syrian capital of Islamic State, looks surprisingly pastoral. As we approached the city across the plain north of the Euphrates we had to stop the car several times: the road was barred by flocks of sheep. It seemed an encouraging sign of returning normality. But local people explained that shepherds were bringing their flocks to graze here for less happy reasons.
It is probably best not to take advice direct and unfiltered from the animal kingdom – but lemurs are, I think, an exception.
Erdoğan is an increasingly lonely figure; the shine long ago came off his international reputation. At home he presides over a state that is in many ways a reflection of his own paranoia.
It’s hard sometimes not to think that most short sellers would have become richer, worked less hard, and suffered less psychological pressure . . .
Rosemary Hill explores frock consciousness in life and literature.
In pre-Civil War fugitive slave narratives – memoirs written by men and, occasionally, women who had escaped to freedom and hoped to convert readers to the cause of abolition – the most heart-rending passages described slave auctions and the separation of families that usually ensued.
Anne Enright delivers her Winter Lecture on the corruptions of the Adam and Eve story.