‘It is increasingly hard to deny the reality that America, like Sparta, expects not friendship but fealty. There need be no consultation prior to military action, or even the show of it.’ Thomas Poole on alliances, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ap...
Thomas Poole | In a League of Their Own
The alliance is a very old political technology. The late Bronze Age, with its dense networks of trade and cultural...
lrb.co.uk
‘In overall effect, 𝘎𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 is reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica. But what crime is being committed here, what battle being fought out? A more ambiguous drama is unfolding.’ Tony Wood on Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, at MoMA. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Tony Wood · At MoMA: Wifredo Lam Reconsidered
Lam referred to a ‘desire to include in my painting all the transculturation that had occurred in Cuba’ – using a...
lrb.co.uk
‘Beauvoir described Cold War America as a coercively cheerful country that refused to confront the reality of death, that expressed its horror of the body in advertisements for deodorant and laxatives.’ @adamshatz.bsky.social’s Winter Lecture, ‘Another Country’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Adam Shatz · Another Country: Visions of America
Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is...
lrb.co.uk
The kidnapping of Maduro inaugurates a highly dangerous era of U.S. empire that for perhaps the first time in an era of mass media is not pretending to be anything other than a violent, extractive enterprise of domination.
A Criminal Empire
The United States launches a conquest and occupation of Venezuela to extract its oil wealth. The neocon dream is the America First dream
forever-wars.com
I'm pre-emptively cringing about the cowardly statement Luxon and Peters are going to release today.
What a massive disappointment, so many embellishments by Sacks, even the man who mistook his wife for a hat... 😞
“Ultimately, the collective strategy of AI companies threatens to deskill precisely those people who are essential for society to function(…) automation of knowledge and culture by private companies is a worrying prospect – conjuring dystopian and outright fascistic scenarios.” — @olivia.science
AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education
Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.
project-syndicate.org
Newsletter: My 16,000 word opus - How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...
How To Argue With An AI Booster
Editor's Note: For those of you reading via email, I recommend opening this in a browser so you can use the Table of Contents. This is my longest newsletter - a 16,000-word-long opus - and if you like...
wheresyoured.at
The Observer takes on the collapse of Unbound - some truly shocking allegations, almost all of which I have seen compelling evidence of as a member of the Unbound author WhatsApp group and through my own experience of being published by them observer.co.uk/news/busines...
Death of a publishing dream: how the Unbound revolution b...
The literary disrupters enjoyed great success with their crowdfunding model, signing authors that other publishers overlooked. And then the money ran out…
observer.co.uk
Increasingly convinced the main damage cell phones have done to creativity isn't decreased attention spans or what not but the elimination of productive boredom. Inspiration comes from the mind filling the void inside. Hard to make art when you're constantly silencing the silence with "content."
During these critical moments following the US bombing of Iran, key lawmakers and pundits are circulating a lie on par with Iraq WMD falsehoods: that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. US intel consensus is they do not. Does it matter? By me and @ahjohnson.bsky.social
Lawmakers and Pundits Speed Run Iraq WMDs-Level Lies About Iran
The US intelligence consensus is that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Why does our media and political class keep implying—and explicitly saying—otherwise?
columnblog.com
"Pictures are famous for their humanness, not for their pictureness." Kurt Vonnegut discussion of art in his 1997 novel Timequake offers one explanation why people might find AI creations unsatisfying.
21 people killed “amid gunfire”. Takes you two paragraphs before you find out who did the shooting. These outlets are making themselves a joke.
‘Whitman’s nature notes reveal a sometimes doleful cast of mind below the delightful notations of the present: of birdsong, trees, the frolics of two kingfishers, the specifics of the evening sky.’ Maureen N. McLane on Walt Whitman: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Maureen N. McLane · Brag and Humblebrag: Walt Whitman’s Encounters
A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, Whitman announces in the first pages of Specimen Days...
lrb.co.uk
Israel’s war in Gaza amounts to genocide, Amnesty International report finds
Israel’s war in Gaza amounts to genocide, Amnesty International report finds
Human rights group says Israel ‘brazenly, continuously and with total impunity … unleashed hell’ on strip’s 2.3m population A report from Amnesty International alleges that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip constitutes the crime of genocide…
theguardian.com
My book “Memory and Remembering” in the Elements series from CUP is out today! PDF free to download for the next month.
Keith Frankish@keithfrankish.com · 3y agoAnd another new Element! *Memory and Remembering* by Felipe De Brigard. Essential reading and free to download till 29 November! www.cambridge.org/core/element... @felipedebrigard.bsky.social
The jump in the covid reinfection rate within 30-90 of previous infection in NZ that peaked in the first week of October, is a pretty good match to the growth in the newish to NZ HK.3 variant in the same week in poops.nz The fall in the reinfection rate since then suggests HK.3 growth will slow.
