Chop-Chop Spirit

Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited, 9 May 2024

Last Day in Lagos 
by Marilyn Nance, edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Fourthwall, 299 pp., £37.50, October 2022, 978 0 9947009 9 5
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... its economy and fomenting a (failed) coup against Touré's government.The Biafran War ended in January 1970; around two million people died as a result of the conflict. General Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian head of state, announced that the Second World Festival of Black Art, or Festac, the new name reflecting changes in racial terminology, was back on the ...

Anti-Constitutional

Wolfgang Streeck: Manufacturing Political Consent, 15 August 2024

Verfassungsschutz: Wie der Geheimdienst Politik macht 
by Ronen Steinke.
Berlin Verlag, 221 pp., €24, June 2023, 978 3 8270 1471 9
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... it from receiving the significant financial support to which German parties are entitled. In 2019, the government and the two chambers of parliament asked the court to exclude the NPD from public funding for six years – the party having shrunk in the meantime into a tiny sect calling itself Die Heimat (Homeland). The motion was granted five years ...

Architectures of Containment

Clair Wills: Ireland’s Lost Children, 20 May 2021

Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes 
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Government of Ireland, 2865 pp., October 2020Show More
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... In spring​ 2019 the Irish Decorative Arts and History Museum in Dublin exhibited a number of works by the glass artist Alison Lowry. Curated by Audrey Whitty, (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths was conceived as a response to the legacy of Magdalen laundries and mother and baby homes in Ireland – religious institutions which, together with former workhouses, orphanages and industrial schools, formed the basis of Irish society’s response to unmarried motherhood and the ‘problem’ of illegitimacy throughout most of the 20th century ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... next chapter in the apocalyptic story that began in Australia with the bushfires in the summer of 2019-20 before moving straight on to the Covid pandemic.From the standpoint of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, perhaps looking for a national security scare to lift his approval ratings in the run-up to the elections in May, Russia was unquestionably part of ...

Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History 
by David Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4
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This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 
by Simon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4
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... patron of new writing as well as of new music. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, broadcast in January 1954, may be the most celebrated piece of literature it’s hard to imagine coming into existence without radio; more generally, plays written for radio have adapted or reinvented an established form. But the great filler was music, especially varieties ...

Different for Girls

Jean McNicol: On Women’s Gymnastics, 15 August 2024

... trial, but any of his victims who wanted to would be able to make victim impact statements, On 16 January 2018 the women he abused began giving their statements; seven days later, Denhollander was the last of 156 victims to speak. A letter Nassar wrote to the judge, Rosemarie Aquilina, made clear that he still felt no responsibility. ‘What I did in the ...

Sell Your Children

Tony Wood: Latin America Shifts Right, 6 November 2025

La cuarta ola: Líderes, fanáticos y oportunistas en la nueva era de la extrema derecha 
by Ariel Goldstein.
Marea Editorial, 168 pp., Arg$24,900, September 2024, 978 987 823 055 9
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Contra la amenaza fantasma: La derecha radical latinoamericana y la reinvención de un enemigo común 
by Farid Kahhat.
Planeta, 170 pp., S/. 39.90, February 2024, 978 612 5037 28 2
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Historia mínima de las derechas latinoamericanas 
by Ernesto Bohoslavsky.
El Colegio de México, 269 pp., Mex$270, February 2023, 978 987 826 759 3
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... to the US Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC itself has held meetings in Brazil (2019-25), Mexico (2022) and Argentina (2024). Following its foundation in Spain in 2020, the Foro Madrid has held exuberant follow-ups in Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires and Asunción.Goldstein shows that Vox-facilitated connections with Eastern European figures such ...

Pointing the Finger

Jacqueline Rose: ‘The Plague’, 7 May 2020

... Ever since​ the arrival of Covid-19 – in Western Europe, roughly at the end of January – sales of Albert Camus’s The Plague, first published in 1947, have increased exponentially, an upsurge strangely in line with the graphs that daily chart the toll of the sick and the dead. By the end of March, monthly sales of the UK Penguin Classics edition had grown from the low hundreds to the mid-thousands and were rising (they are now up 1000 per cent ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... factor to Lord Leverhulme, who was on the verge of buying Harris, wrote that for seven weeks from January to March no cargo at all had been landed from Glasgow, with the result that for the last ten days of that time there had been no food in the local shops: ‘the people were without butter or margarine, no sugar, no bacon … The whole position is really ...

Dynamo Current, Feet, Fists, Salt

Adam Shatz: What did you do in the war?, 18 February 2021

Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? Enquête sur un silence familial 
by Raphaëlle Branche.
La Découverte, 512 pp., £21.50, September 2020, 978 2 7071 9878 5
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... of silence’ they had inherited, and assumed some of that suffering as their own. In February 2019, Branche received a letter from the daughter of an appelé who had died more than twenty years earlier:This morning, at five o’clock, I finally began your book on torture and the army in Algeria. I have formulated this phrase for the first time: so my ...

Which is worse?

Adam Tooze: Germany Divided, 18 July 2019

Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik – Report aus dem Innern der Macht 
by Robin Alexander.
Siedler, 288 pp., €19.99, March 2017, 978 3 8275 0093 9
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Die SPD: Biographie einer Partei von Ferdinand Lassalle bis Andrea Nahles 
by Franz Walter.
Rowohlt, 416 pp., €16, June 2018, 978 3 499 63445 1
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Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe 
by Oliver Nachtwey, translated by Loren Balhorn and David Fernbach.
Verso, 247 pp., £16.99, November 2018, 978 1 78663 634 8
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Die Schulz Story: Ein Jahr zwischen Höhenflug und Absturz 
by Markus Feldenkirchen.
DVA, 320 pp., €20, March 2018, 978 3 421 04821 9
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... been thought of as both the pace-setter and the anchor of European politics. But in the summer of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War. The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, founded in April 2013 in reaction to the Eurozone crisis, surged into the Bundestag in the 2017 election with 12.6 per ...

Delete the workforce

Deborah Friedell: Musk’s Twitter Takeover, 3 April 2025

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter 
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
Cornerstone, 468 pp., £25, September 2024, 978 1 5299 1469 6
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Elon Musk 
by Walter Isaacson.
Simon and Schuster, 688 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 3985 2753 9
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... no ford-fire.com. Tesla had nearly gone bankrupt in 2008, and again between 2017 and 2019: even as he was on track to be the richest man in the world, he couldn’t stop worrying that his company might fall apart. If consumers weren’t confident that Teslas were roadworthy, it wasn’t just that he would lose nearly all his money, Musk ...

To Monopolise Our Ears

Daniel Cohen: What Spotify Wants, 4 May 2023

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance 
by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud.
Diversion, 295 pp., £15.99, January 2021, 978 1 63576 744 5
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Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation 
by Nick Seaver.
Chicago, 203 pp., £16, November 2022, 978 0 226 82297 6
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... to sleep’.As part of this project to monopolise our ears, Spotify has moved beyond music. Since 2019 it has made a series of expensive investments in podcasting, buying production companies such as Gimlet and the Ringer, striking deals to produce shows with the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan, and paying more than $200 million for the exclusive rights to ...

Fraudpocalypse

John Lanchester, 4 August 2022

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth 
by Dan McCrum.
Bantam, 326 pp., £20, June 2022, 978 1 78763 504 3
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... to run until Christmas this year, but he was transferred to prison in Germany and released in January 2021.) Germany does not extradite to the US, so the five other senior executives charged by the US authorities were safe from the Feds. A number of them were tried in Germany, where they were all acquitted. It turned out that the demanding, notoriously ...

In the Multiverse

Jessica Olin: What Knox did next, 9 October 2025

Free: My Search for Meaning 
by Amanda Knox.
Headline, 283 pp., £22, March, 978 1 0354 2815 1
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The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox 
produced by K.J. Steinberg.
Disney+, August
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... when he suggested she use a pseudonym. She got a second job behind the till at Arundel. But in January 2014 the Court of Cassation found Knox and Sollecito guilty for a second time. Faced with the threat of extradition and a 28-year prison sentence, Knox once again considered suicide. Meanwhile, her family plotted to smuggle her to safety. ‘At ...