Links tagged with “lrb”
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Bee Wilson · The Irreplaceable: Palm Oil Dependency · LRB 23 June 2022
On the rise of, and economics of, palm oil that “ended up in everything”.
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Deborah Friedell · A Piece of Pizza and a Beer: Who was Jane Roe? · LRB 23 June 2022
I did not know, or had forgotten, how Roe v. Wade came to be.
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Stephanie Burt · Diary: D&D · LRB 9 June 2022
Role-playing games, concluding an excellent issue of the LRB.
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William Davies · Destination Unknown: Sociology Gone Wrong · LRB 9 June 2022
On inequality, capitalism, sociology, nation states, colonialism.
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Jonathan Meades · Hatpin through the Brain: Closing Time for the Firm · LRB 9 June 2022
On the British monarchy.
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Simon Reynolds · Serious Mayhem: The McLaren Strand · LRB 10 March 2022
On the career of Malcolm McLaren.
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Clair Wills · Life Pushed Aside: The Last Asylums · LRB 18 November 2021
Very long and good history of a psychiatric hospital in the 20th century, outsider art, and the authors’ mother and grandparents who worked there. More interesting than I initially expected.
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Adam Tooze · Ecological Leninism: Drill, baby, drill · LRB 6 November 2021
A second article on Andreas Malm in the same issue. Makes me think I should read ‘White Skin, Black Fuel’ and/or ‘How to Blow up a Pipeline’.
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James Butler · A Coal Mine for Every Wildfire: Where are the ecoterrorists? · LRB 6 November 2021
On the climate crisis, Andreas Malm, direct action, “fossil fascism”, where we’re trying to get to, and how.
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Charles Glass · Hush-Hush Boom-Boom: Spymasters · LRB 12 August 2021
Interesting account of how the CIA was formed and quite how often it’s failed.
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James Meek · Who holds the welding rod? Our Turbine Futures · LRB 15 July 2021
Long article on making wind turbine towers and the international labour market (which maybe makes it sound duller than it is).
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Gill Partington · Your hat sucks: UbuWeb · LRB 1 April 2021
About UbuWeb and Kenneth Goldsmith.
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Chloe Aridjis · At the HKW: Aby Warburg · LRB 5 November 2020
I hadn’t heard of Warburg’s ‘Bilderatlas Mnemosyne’ before. A “display of almost a thousand images … an attempt to create something like a flowchart of Western civilisation“.
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Patricia Lockwood · Eat butterflies with me? · LRB 5 November 2020
On Nabokov, entertaining.
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Peter Geoghegan · Cronyism and Clientelism · LRB 5 November 2020
Depressing piece from November on the UK’s kleptocracy.
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Alex Abramovich · Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie: ‘Country Music’ · LRB 8 October 2020
Good, critical review of Ken Burns’ ‘Country Music’ and the rest.
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Andrew O’Hagan · I’m being a singer: Dandy Highwaymen · LRB 8 October 2020
On the New Romantics. “It turns out that the inheritors of punk were not those little indie bands I loved … Male indie kids were completely conventional, scrubbed boys, who went to the same barbers as their fathers, supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave.”
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Jenny Turner · Dark Emotions: The Women’s Liberation Movement · LRB 24 September 2020
Interesting look back at (mostly) 1970s feminism.
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James Lasdun · Bats on the Ceiling: The Gospel of St Karen · LRB 24 September 2020
This was a good read about a con involving some ancient, supposedly biblical, papyrus.
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Ian Penman · Vorsprung durch Techno · LRB 10 September 2020
I’m always pleased to see an Ian Penman article in the LRB and I liked this ambivalent one about Kraftwerk.
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Tom Crewe · A Girl Called Retina: You’ll like it when you get there · LRB 13 August 2020
The first half of this especially good, full of jolly entertaining anecdotes about mid 20th century girls’ boarding schools.
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Amia Srinivasan · He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita: How Should I Refer to You? · LRB 2 July 2020
I had no idea there had been quite so many attempts to come up with gender-neutral pronouns for quite so long.
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Andrew O’Hagan · Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade: The Soho Alphabet · LRB 16 July 2020
I enjoyed this portrait of a Soho despite, or because of, being unfamiliar with that world.
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Ange Mlinko · Just a Diphthong Away: Gary Lutz · LRB 7 May 2020
Lots of great lines quoted from Lutz’s short stories here.
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Erin Maglaque · Inclined to Putrefaction: In Quarantine · LRB 9 February 2020
Published in February, this review of a book about how 17th century Florence coped with the plague now seems very knowing.
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Jenny Turner · Who Are They?: The Institute of Ideas · LRB 8 July 2010
Nine years ago: “One day, the conditions would be right and they [the RCP/LM/IoI crowd] would be ready: public-sector cuts, rising unemployment, the collapsing Euro, a Tory government, more or less.” (Subscribers only)
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How bad can it get? (London Review of Books)
Good, but not much hope about UK politics. But I learned an excellent word: “rhodomontade”, extravagant boasting. Word of the year.
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Francis Gooding reviews ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells · LRB 1 August 2019
On the plus side, I’ll be dead by 2100. I suspect my 80s+ won’t be great though. Sometimes I wonder why young people and folks with kids aren’t demonstrating *all the time*. (No, I know why.)
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John Lanchester · Good New Idea: Universal Basic Income · LRB 18 July 2019
Seems like a decent overview of the options, nicely written as ever.
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Patricia Lockwood · The Communal Mind: The Internet and Me · LRB 21 February 2019
A lovely piece about what it’s like to be online, “in the portal”, these days.
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Alice Spawls · On the Sofa: ‘Killing Eve’ · LRB 8 November 2018
The show wasn’t perfect, but this is good on what was good about it.
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Stefan Collini reviews ‘The Tyranny of Metrics’ by Jerry Z. Muller and ‘The Metric Tide’ by James Wilsdon et al · LRB 8 November 2018
On the unintended consequences of performance metrics. (Subscribers only.)
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Eliot Weinberger · Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America · LRB 25 October 2018
If you want to be thankful that our mess is only the size of Brexit, this might help? (Sorry America)
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James Meek · Brexit and Myths of Englishness: For England and St George · LRB 11 October 2018
Good on stuff about Brexit, around the politics: beliefs, myths, personal hypocrisies.
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Tom Crewe reviews ‘How to Survive a Plague’ … · LRB 27 September 2018
If you were too young, straight, insulated or ignorant to fully grasp what Aids meant and means, this is a long and sobering read.
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Bee Wilson reviews ‘The Littlehampton Libels’ by Christopher Hilliard · LRB 8 February 2018
A lovely article about a woman writing very sweary anonymous letters to her neighbours in Littlehampton in the 1920s.
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The Playboy of West 29th Street (London Review of Books)
Colm Tóibín on John Butler Yeats. For the unrequited, long-distance love in old age and the perpetually almost-but-never finished artwork. (Subscribers only)
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George Duoblys · One, Two, Three, Eyes on Me! · LRB 5 October 2017
On the “efficient” teaching and disciplinary methods used in some London secondary schools. Sounds grim.
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Merely an Empire - London Review of Books
Good on Ken Burns’ ‘The Vietnam War’. “We cannot make a movie that will save us.”
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London Review of Books - You Are the Product
John Lanchester on Facebook.
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Owen Hatherley reviews ‘Eyes on the Street’ by Robert Kanigel and ‘Vital Little Plans’ edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring · LRB 27 July 2017
Good on Jane Jacobs’ good and bad, and all that in relation to British cities. (Subscribers only)
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James Wolcott reviews ‘Making It’ by Norman Podhoretz · LRB 18 May 2017
A very fun, lively-written read, even though most of the people mentioned mean little to me. Reminded me of reading The Modern Review, how I enjoyed it without understanding so many of the references.
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Tom Crewe · What will be left?: Labour’s Prospects · LRB 18 May 2017
Slightly out of date opinion poll-wise, but I liked this as a summary of where Labour is and how we, as a country, got here.
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The Last London - London Review of Books
I usually find Iain Sinclair a bit much, too grouchy, but the start of this is very good on modern London, around Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Liverpool Street.
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The Strange Death of Municipal England (London Review of Books)
A good read, especially if you’re feeling all full of optimism about a new year and need to be brought crashing back to earth.
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Snob Cuts (London Review of Books)
A fun, brief piece about snobbery and class.
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They Could Have Picked… (London Review of Books)
Eliot Weinberger on all the Republican presidential candidates other than Trump. At this point it’s become easy to forget that they were *all* nutjobs. Still, makes me thankful to live in the UK.
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The Satoshi Affair (London Review of Books)
An entertaining long read by Andrew O’Hagan about Craig Wright proving that he’s Satoshi Nakamoto.
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Nigel’s Against the World (London Review of Books)
I’ve mostly been ignoring EU referendum stuff but this is quite good on the things we don’t really know about what happens if we leave.
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Stefan Collini · Who are the spongers now? · LRB 21 January 2016
It’s probably only because I’m not involved in higher education, and don’t have children heading towards it, that I find reading things like this, about the government’s current and future plans, enjoyable, like dystopian fiction.