Like Jerry Seinfeld and LeBron James, Obama exemplifies what can be done by super-talented individuals in a winner-take-all world. He won and did indeed take it all, including the $65 million he and Michelle received in a package deal that has produced A Promised Land. More power to him. But his example is not a recipe for structural change. Quite the contrary.
Diane Williams, read by the author
Diane Williams reads her story ’Tassel Rue’.
What would the history of Germany have been if the SPD leaders had let the revolution take its course? Perhaps a radical but generous and democratic socialism, Marxist but not Leninist or Stalinist in its treatment of dissent. Perhaps – but would such a socialist state have been able to resist the vengeance of those who had lost power?
Thomas Jones, read by the author
Thomas Jones reads his homage to Maradona, with help from some 1980s commentators.
John Lanchester, read by the author
That feeling of similar-but-not-quite is present all through the history of our engagement with the Neanderthals: when we look at them we are looking at a distorted reflection in a mirror. As with a mirror-gazer, we have a tendency to want everything to be about us. The reflection is fascinating, unsettling, and it’s not quite clear what we want it to tell us.
Freud is offering a philosophy of grief. He helps us understand why what is happening among us now can feel as much an internal as an external catastrophe. Death in a pandemic is no way to die.
Trump will cast a long shadow, especially overseas, where America’s image has suffered a calamitous blow. Every country is at times reduced to playing a crude caricature of itself, exhibiting its ugliest attributes. The question now is whether the US can move beyond its worst expression. We have a long way to go before America becomes, at last, what James Baldwin called ‘another country’.
Secret emissaries promise that a certain army general will bring ten thousand soldiers across to you. Émigré ‘experts’ assure you that the peasantry of a certain province is itching to rise in arms as soon as you land and raise the rebel standard. How confident are you that any of this is true – or is it at best greedy con-men’s patter, at worst a trap?
Diane Williams, read by the author
Diane Williams reads her story ‘Stick’.
Misogynist tropes often involve presenting women as interesting in precisely the ways that Aeschylus’ female characters are interesting: charming, articulate, dangerous, deceitful, too clever by half, lustful, angry, violent, and consumed by excessive emotion.
The coming together of Cézanne and Pissarro – their common cause, their peaceful coexistence, their rivalry, their contrariety – is a mystery. For me it is the deepest mystery of the 19th century; and I cannot escape the feeling that if we could unravel it we would have in our hands the key to French painting, in much the same way as the relation of Plato to Socrates, for example, still seems the key to ‘philosophy’.
Twenty years ago, the National Rifle Association didn’t know what to do after a mass shooting. But it now has the protocol down: it’s had, after all, plenty of practice.
Joe Biden seems to have got into politics simply because he could: for the fuck of it, not out of any ethical commitment or bracing ambition. Unlike most recent Democrat and Republican nominees for president he isn’t a meritocrat (Dukakis, the Clintons, Obama) or an aristocrat (the Bushes, Gore, Kerry), or the son of a powerful father (McCain, Romney, Trump). Not being an egghead is his biggest asset in the fight v. Trump.
It is easy to overlook how loud pre-modern education was. Most of our evidence for more than a thousand years of teaching consists of books, and, to the modern way of thinking, books are objects used silently. That this was not the usual way of doing things for much of Western history is now better known, though still difficult fully to understand.
There was very often a scientific purpose to the collecting – it’s always good to find new species – but there is no missing the sheer delight Joseph Banks took in going about it. Banksian collecting involved tramping, climbing, shooting and fishing. He was a plant hunter as much as he was a collector.