MetaFilter posts tagged with LRB

"I wanted to say: it’s nothing personal, it’s monarchy I’m staring at."

Fizz — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 06:02:11 -0800

"I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting?"

The sale of the century

scruss — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 04:38:31 -0800

How We Happened to Sell Off Our Electricity is James Meek's dissection of the systematic re-privatisation of the UK power industry.

Are you an enemy of liberal principles if you question the fact that, when local electrical engineers dig up the roads in London, they’re working for East Asia’s richest man, the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-shing? In north-east England, they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund.

A leftist who experienced the West as the South.

adamvasco — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:36:09 -0800

Journalism and Revolution is a review from Dissent Magazine about the biography of Ryszard Kapuściński. This was Neal Ascherson in LRB.
Both of which are very different from Jack Shafer´s take down obituary piece in Slate.

Melkor just SOUNDS evil

Chrysostom — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 10:21:12 -0800

More than most literary phenomena, names in fiction seem very straightforward until you start to think about them. The simple question, ‘why does a name sound right?’ leads to a whole range of questions. Are there rules about how names are given to characters? Do naming practices differ in different periods? Are they specific to particular genres? Do different authors use names in entirely different ways? There are also anxieties to address: is discussion of names in fiction snagged in a feedback loop, in which we think James Bond is such a good name for a spy because that’s what we know it to be?

Short Cuts

Elementary Penguin — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:24:16 -0800

When they take my shoelaces and belt, I realise that this is more serious than I had thought.

I am in a Manhattan precinct cell, early on a Sunday morning in August, having been stopped for making an illegal turn in my car. The officer who has stopped me takes my licence and (for complicated reasons involving my sister’s mother-in-law) Texas registration, goes back to his vehicle for a bit, and then returns to my car. ‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car.’ I’ve watched television. They must be checking my sobriety. ‘Sir, are you aware that your licence has been suspended in the state of New York?’ I am not aware of that. That’s going to mean a hell of a fine. Another police car pulls up behind his, lights flashing. ‘Sir, please turn and place your hands behind your back.’ I turn and prepare to recite the alphabet backwards while standing on one leg (as I’ve seen on television). Something clicks around my wrists. Handcuffs. I’ve never been in handcuffs before. I’ve always prided myself on my positive relationship with the police.

Among the Alawites: Nir Rosen reports from Syria

Cloud King — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:58:33 -0800

Among the Alawites: Nir Rosen reports from Syria

Perry Anderson's essays about modern states in The London Review of Books

Kattullus — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 16:15:39 -0800

Perry Anderson's book length three part series on the history of India from the beginnings of its independence movement, through independence and partition into its recent history as a nation-state is the latest in a series of erudite, opinionated and wordy articles in The London Review of Books by the UCLA professor of history and sociology on the modern history of various countries, so far taking in Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Cyprus, the EU, Russia, Taiwan and France. Lula's Brazil (previously). Land without Prejudice: Berlusconi’s Italy, An Entire Order Converted into What It Was Intended to End: Italy’s Decline, An Invertebrate Left: Italy’s Squandered Heritage. Kemalism: After the Ottomans, After Kemal. The Divisions of Cyprus (previously). Depicting Europe (previously). Russia's Managed Democracy: Why Putin? (plus Anderson's contemporary reflection on being in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed). Stand-Off in Taiwan. Dégringolade: The Fall of France, Union Sucrée: The Normalising of France. The letters in response appended to the bottom of the articles are often quite interesting and generally worth reading. Perry Anderson has also written articles on other subjects for the LRB.

Once a Catholic...: Marina Warner on Damien Hirst

Cloud King — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:05:40 -0800

Once a Catholic...: Marina Warner on Damien Hirst

Save us from the saviors

Cloud King — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 09:35:34 -0800

Slavoj Žižek on Europe and the Greeks

Jacqueline Rose on Marilyn Monroe

Cloud King — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:26:25 -0800

Jacqueline Rose on Marilyn Monroe

John Lanchester on Marx

pharm — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:05:29 -0800

John Lanchester on Marx in the LRB.

Baffled at a Bookcase

adamvasco — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:52:26 -0800

Alan Bennett returns to the library.
I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled.

Just Keep Screwing That Chicken

The Whelk — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:14:09 -0800

The ten strangest sentences in David Brooks' latest book "The Social Animal"

Documentaries short and long

Kattullus — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 10:27:58 -0800

Cinelan 3 Minute Stories are short documentaries on diverse subjects, such as The London Review of Books personals section, 60s martial arts legend and self-styled 'deadliest man alive' Count Dante and The R.O.M.E.O.s, a group of five old friends from New York in their 70s and 80s who go out to eat and talk about stuff. If you have more time New Video Digital has some full length documentaries (and a few other films) such as The Atomic Cafe, Oscar winner From Mao to Mozart, and season one of Michael Moore's The Awful Truth TV series.

Among the Flutterers

puny human — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 11:04:37 -0800

Among the Flutterers: In this long, thoughtful essay for the LRB, Irish novelist Colm Tóibín examines the relationship between the Catholic church and homosexuality.

Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of command, accompanied by a persistent reluctance to be seen as the source of the policy he commandeers.

gerryblog — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:21:43 -0800

To push through even one more victory on the order of healthcare, Obama will have to give up the posture of mediator that comes naturally to him. He will have to admit in his political practice that there are parties; that he is the leader of a party; that there is a worse and a better cause; that it feels like a fight because it really is a fight. This does not mean just the adoption of a new set of tactics. It will require almost the emergence of a new character.

in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal

blasdelf — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:23:51 -0800

Berlusconi in Tehran by Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books

Hitting bottom

Kattullus — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:33:54 -0800

On 200 mg a day of baclofen, in an important meeting with several associate deans of my college and three new department chairs (I was made chair of my philosophy department just a few weeks before I tried to commit suicide), I fell asleep with my head on the conference room table and, for 40 minutes, everyone was too embarrassed to wake me. Somnolence is the most obvious and inconvenient side effect of baclofen. I reduced my dosage to 100 mg a day, and started taking it only at bedtime. A few days later, a colleague asked if I had changed my medicine. ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Why do you ask?’ She is German, an analytic philosopher, and therefore very direct: ‘You are drooling less than you were.’

My Life as a Drunk is a searingly honest essay by novelist and philosophy professor Clancy Martin about his experiences with alcoholism, AA, valium and baclofen.

"There needs to be a general acceptance that the current model has failed."

Kattullus — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:10:18 -0800

It's Finished is a witty and erudite essay by MeFi lurker John Lanchester in The London Review of Books on how completely and utterly screwed the British economy is. In the process of laying out his case Lanchester touches on varied issues, such Scottish banknotes, why Alan Hollinghurst's phrase "tremendous, Basil Fawltyish lengths" is applicable to the reaction by the US and UK governments to the banking meltdown, the value destruction of corporate mergers, the invention of modern accounting, and why no one really knows how large a share of the failed banks is owned by governments.

LRB Blog

stammer — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:09:10 -0800

The London Review of Books, the most politically radical of the high-end literary review magazines, now has a blog. It is being updated two or three times a day with pretty substantial posts by the LRB's regular stable of swanky essayists: Diski on the parliamentary expenses scandal, O'Hagan on Michael Savage, and lots and lots from Thomas Jones, who seems to be in charge.

Saved and Depoliticised at One Stroke

geoff. — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:06:13 -0800

"The most startling features of Kosovo, now that the cleansing of the Serbian minority is on hold, are the poverty of the province ... and the pitiful economy that keeps it locked in."

Once a supplier of farm produce to other parts of Yugoslavia, Kosovo now brings in almost all its food, along with fuel and building materials. Its leading ‘export’ is scrap metal, a harvest of rundown plant from the Milosevic era and Nato bomb damage. Kosovo’s trade gap is dramatic: imports account for 90 per cent of legal cross-border trade ... The ambiguous status of the territory has been a large disincentive to foreign investors. Who can tell where their capital will be tied up or their taxes levied ten years from now? In a largely autonomous part of Serbia? A protectorate run by a handful of jaded international bodies? Or Europe’s latest sovereign state?

The Divisions of Cyprus

Kattullus — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:59:07 -0800

Labour, which had started the disasters of Cyprus by denying it any decolonisation after 1945, had now completed them, abandoning it to trucidation [by doing nothing when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974]. London was quite prepared to yield Cyprus to Greece in 1915, in exchange for Greek entry into the war on its side. Had it done so, all subsequent suffering might have been avoided. It is enough to compare the fate of Rhodes, still closer to Turkey and with a comparable Turkish minority, which in 1945 peacefully reverted to Greece, because it was an Italian not a British colony. In the modern history of the Empire, the peculiar malignity of the British record in Cyprus stands apart.

The Divisions of Cyprus, an article in The London Review of Books by historian Perry Anderson, is an excellent history of Cyprus from 1878 to the modern day as well as a polemic against the way that outside powers have treated the island. 1964 Canadian interview with Cypriot Archbishop and President Makarios.

The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam

bhouston — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:01:37 -0800

"The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history." Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress and more recently the director of the CFR's US/Middle East Project, argues in this essay from the London Review of Books that:

...all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The entire sequence takes 26 seconds. There’s too much to take in. Or, you don’t know what you’ve taken in, and how deep the impression has been.

acro — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:18:39 -0800

The Flow, by Paul Myerscough

That image gives way, quickly and successively, to a series of others: a young black woman smoking, smiling at the camera through a reinforced glass window; three teenage girls in a car, laughing, filmed through the windscreen; a whip-pan to the American flag, pierced by sunlight, drifting in the breeze; a DIY programme on a pixellated TV screen; a ride-along shot of a family in an oversized golf buggy; two different angles of a man alone in a lecture theatre; two more of traffic at night; a woman, suspicious of the camera, wearing a polka-dot dress and partly obscured by glassy reflections; a blurry shot of a long windowless corridor; a man wearing shades in a crowded street; a woman pursued down the cosmetics aisle of a supermarket; and, as Curtis comes to the end of his three short sentences, a woman seen jogging in the wing-mirror of a moving car. The entire sequence takes 26 seconds. There’s too much to take in. Or, you don’t know what you’ve taken in, and how deep the impression has been.

The Things We Throw Away

criticalbill — Sat, 19 May 2007 07:02:48 -0800

Excellent 8,000 word essay on waste disposal in the endlessly superlative LRB. Andrew O'Hagen goes bin-raiding with Freegans, talks up Zero Waste, rides with the (contraversial) Harrow binmen, meets the Community Recycling Network, tramps over the Calvert Landfill Site and pays a visit to the London Waste EcoPark Recycling and Energy Centre aka the Edmonton Incinerator. Doesn’t meet any mafia though. 8,000 words and none wasted.