http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n20/malcolm-bull/great-again

Against Everything: On Dishonest Times by Mark Greif Verso, 304 pp, £16.99, September 2016, ISBN 978 1 78478 592 5 When the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at ‘a time when serious writing…

A ll politicians love to complain about the press. They complain for good reasons and bad. They cry over frivolous slights and legitimate inquiries alike. They

I, Daniel Blake , Ken Loach’s new film, has kicked off a row between the director and The Sunday Times ’ film critic, Camilla Long. Published on Sunday, the review – which called the film a “povvo safari for middle-class do-gooders” – has led to Loach and some audience members rowing with Long…

Karl Marx famously argued that alienation of labour (our most basic activity) meant that we felt human only during ‘animal functions’ such as eating and drinking. Of course, Marx had never met Rob Rhinehart, the entrepreneur recently featured in a Lizzie Widdicombe New Yorker piece for his efforts…

Donald Trump seeks a return to 1950s America, well before the age of neoliberalism.Photograph: H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images T he western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation…

Tasters have compared Soylent to Cream of Wheat and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” Photograph by Henry Hargreaves In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. They had received a hundred and seventy…

“Something bad is happening,” Donald J. Trump warned New Hampshire voters Tuesday night, casting suspicions on Muslims and mosques. “Something really dangerous is going on.” On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif.,…

A specter is haunting America: the specter of narcissism. It shows up in the flood of recent books with titles like “Narcissists Exposed” and “The Narcissist Next Door,” in hand-wringing over Instagram-addicted millennials, in studies showing that American writers are using “I” and “me” more…

A film by Tsai Ming-liang can feel like a test. More specifically, a staring contest. How long can you look? Somewhere into the eleven-minute sequence in Stray Dog s (2013), where the protagonist hugs, kisses, and then devours a cabbage with a human face painted on it, I blinked. Tsai has been…

In almost every film Michael Haneke has made, an animal dies on-screen. The protagonists of The Seventh Continent (1989), his first feature, smash the tank of their family goldfish, which we watch writhe and asphyxiate. In the German-language Funny Games (1997), the preppy intruders who terrorize a…

Writing a personal essay can be a full-body activity, replete with tremors and tears and physical aches. Recollection is strenuous. Recreating a scene can be downright exhausting. In those instances, I prefer the tolls to be paid on my own terms. At my personal blog, I spent seven years writing…

The Rolling Stones, 1963. Monitor Picture Library/Photoshot/Getty Images This article is adapted from Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination . In January of 1973—the same month that the Rolling Stones were banned from touring Japan due to prior drug convictions, the same…

Slogan city: a protestor fights back against gentrification.Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/Observer I have started a list in the back of a notebook, a short dictionary of the language of gentrification. It began with the word “decanted”. Typically we decant wine from a bottle into a carafe in order…

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak Princeton, 331 pp, £15.95, December 2005, ISBN 0 691 12117 6 If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has…

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-sky-might-fall-on-your-head/

http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/9/14/12910180/noam-chomsky-tom-wolfe-linguist

American Artist, A Refusal (2015), Online performance, Ongoing In art that defines itself by what it withholds from public view lies the challenge for us to do the same AN image that is not shared publicly on social media platforms, a dignity image provides the means by which Internet users may gain…

Photo Op by kennardphillipps at Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War exhibition at IWM North Photograph: kennardphillipps/Reuters Tony Blair grins for his photograph as he holds up his smartphone to take a selfie. He's delighted with himself and what he's done. Behind him, black smoke and hellish…

When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. I still even remember the theme song for the TV show, mostly, which wasn't a song so much as a guy in a gruff bear voice speaking in rhyming couplets. If you don't know who the…

Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of…

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite…

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall…

If you’ve clicked on any articles about the victims of recent terror attacks, you might have seen a photo of the man above. Following the deadly terrorist attack at Atatürk airport in Istanbul, Turkey, social media users shared his photo, claiming this man was among the 42 people killed. His photo…

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/owen-hatherley/one-click-at-a-time

‘To see Nigel Farage there with his desktop flag was to suddenly and irrevocably understand it: the UK is the Gareth Keenan of Europe.’Photograph: Isopix/Rex/Shutterstock I n a crowded field, I think it was the flag that was the killer. The absolute state of that flag. Nigel Farage’s desktop Union…

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094385-ai-just-got-a-big-boost-in-its-ability-to-understand-the-news/

Miranda Sawyer warming up for a 10K race in 2014.Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer T hese are the facts. I am in my 40s. I have a job. I am married. We have children and a flat with no garden, and a mortgage and a fridge-freezer and a navy blue estate car. None of this is a surprise. Is…

LONDON — One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age So says David…

https://medium.com/@washingtonpost/stop-using-periods-period-93a6bb357ed0

Prince at the 2011 MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute to Barbra Streisand in Los Angeles. Rick Diamond/WireImage via Getty Images We learned Thursday that Prince died of an opioid overdose —specifically from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid often prescribed to people who have built up a tolerance to…

“Lead Angular Expert after announcement about moving the project to React.js”

A Candid Interview With a Chatbot On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well. Within hours, Tay was spewing racist, misogynist, xenophobic remarks, mirroring the users reacting with it with lines like “Hitler was right I hate the Jews.”…

Editor’s Note: Conservative proponents of the guaranteed income want a lump sum payment ( Charles Murray suggests about $11,000 to all adults) to replace existing social welfare programs and downsize American bureaucracy. But some leftists oppose those government welfare agencies, too, London School…

The Internet will never tire of the strange beauty of an awkwardly placed cat. This poor feline who is stuck on the stairs, somewhere between a comfy cat-loaf position and actually being able to stand is a perfect example. Poor cat. Image: reddit, catcatdogcat We're sure the cute kitty was able to…

In the late 1990s, when I wanted more than anything to be a famous writer, I took a job as assistant to J.D. Salinger’s literary agent at Harold Ober Associates, the oldest literary agency in the country. Walking into Ober’s offices in midtown Manhattan was like climbing through a wormhole: Overhead…

Australian smokers are set to pay $45 [about $33 USD] for a packet of cigarettes by September 2020. The tax increase will be gradual, with a steady rise of 12.5 percent each year between 2017 and 2020. As Australia's Treasurer Scott Morrison explained in "The net impact of the tobacco measures will…

A mental adventure familiar to most students is that of cramming one’s mind with knowledge in the run up to an exam.

Above: A 1945 Tribune story tells the tale of the famously macabre Whitechapel Club. At the end of the 19th century, America had still never seen a belly dancer. So when Omene, a natural self-promoter with a knack for entrancing journalists, came on the scene in 1889, she gained national notoriety.…

Louis Pattison looks back two decades to when the electronic musician Bryn Jones was at the height of his powers recording as Muslimgauze - and speaks to the people who knew him and musicians who were influenced by him Twenty years ago, Bryn Jones was on a roll. In 1996, the Mancunian musician, who…