August 2015

My mother doesn’t remember Pearl Harbor. But she was there. Barely two months old, she spent the raid held tightly by her mother in an improvised bomb shelter, where the two of them had joined some Honolulu neighbors.

Germany is Europe's largest economy, and its wealth depends heavily on exporting industrial goods made with cheap electricity. Lignite is the cheapest source of electricity from fossil fuels, and Germany has the world's largest reserves of it.

When it comes to fiscal policy the politics of the right at the moment could be reasonably described as deficit fetishism. The policy of the centre left in Europe could also with some justification be described as growing appeasement towards deficit fetishism.

In the used bookstores of Boston in the late 1980s, the Renaissance section always had multiple cheap copies of two books: E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance.

Sixty years ago, as the Cold War intensified, the end of the world seemed much too close for comfort. The threat of nuclear destruction, implicit in the newspaper headlines of the day, naturally leached into popular culture.

My Yorkshire friend was saying that she hated being in an old house. There seemed to be other people in it besides the living.

Amar Kanwar wants us to see what most of us prefer not to see: destruction and suffering caused by social injustice and violence fuelled by poisonous racist ideologies, political power battles and corporate greed. It’s not that his images are particularly hard to see.

I noted a report in The Independent yesterday about comments that the shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, had made about what he called Corbynomics. These are, I presume, the policies announced by Jeremy Corbyn nearly two weeks ago.

A glance at celebrity websites and magazines serves to confirm that it is possible to make a living by taking photos of very famous people doing very ordinary things: walking dogs, pumping gas, dropping children off at daycare.

For Wayne, a more authentic anti-bourgeois understanding of Kant will emerge once we place aesthetic experience back at the heart of the critical project, allowing us to reframe broader political issues of freedom, community, reification and the spectacle.

Tell me about Slug’s, that much-loved and famously dangerous place on East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C.

Let me begin with a hypothesis, one I'd like to think Henri might agree with: revolutionary citizenship is not a right: it has to be taken, recreated anew, struggled for – not rubber-stamped.