Reading

Extract from Susan Sontag’s diary

“X” is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. when you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + name-dropping, or by being very…
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Food crisis

Wonderful article in the December New Internationalist about the global food crisis. As the magazine points out, we hear a lot about the financial crisis, but comparatively little about the food crisis which pushed 100 million people into situations of…
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The Triumph of Triviality

We are the people of tomorrow, we have more stuff than anybody's ever had before, and we are so stupid and self-absorbed that we can't even bring ourselves to care about our imminent destruction of the planet (voting on the…
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Americans in the gulag

Just caught a fascinating piece in the Times Literary Supplement about the thousands of Americans who, either out of idealism or to escape the Great Depression, moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them were then swept…
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