Author Public Reading Rooms
His loves stretched from Doris Day to Frank Sinatra to Rai, Lowkey and the Young’uns and beyond – by Andrew Burgin
PREGNANT PAUSE: Remarks on the Corona Crisis
from Ken Knabb We were already living in a general global crisis, but most people were only vaguely aware of it since it was manifested in a confusing array of particular crises — social, political, economic, environmental. Climate change is the most momentous of these crises, but it is so complicated and so gradual that it has been easy for most people to ignore it. The corona crisis has been sudden, undeniable, and inescapable. It is also taking place in an unprecedented context. If this crisis had taken place fifty or sixty years ago, we would have been totally at…
Nurseries: Protecting Small Children, Staff and Parents
Jonathan Neale The UK government plans to start opening schools, nurseries and day care on June 1. There is a very large movement of resistance, led by school staff and parents. I have three thoughts that might be useful. First, the worst danger is not that children die. It’s not even that vulnerable staff die, which is much more likely. The worst danger is that a child catches a light case and takes the virus home and a mum or dad with an underlying condition dies, and the child lives with that for seventy years. Some people wonder if children…
Lenin at 150 – an appreciation
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Lenin (born April 22, 1870) David McNally writes: I have long been allergic to the Lenin cult nurtured in many quarters. More than one radical group has been ruined by puffed up “generals” passing off their hectoring commands in place of real politics. But Lenin himself, that’s another story. Perry Anderson once observed that Lenin effectively created a Marxist “science of politics.” But there is more to it than that. It is true that Lenin was uniquely attentive to the concrete specificities of political struggle. The…
Dangerous Times
Susan Pashkoff writes This has been a rather impressive week even for Donald Trump. Whenever you think that he has reached the nadir of his Presidency, he always manages to continue the downward trend; it is like a sink-hole that appears in the middle of an area that simply sucks everything in its path downwards. The freezing of funding to the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic was jaw dropping; Richard Horton the Editor in Chief of The Lancet, Britain’s premier medical journal, rightly called his behaviour “a crime against humanity.” Thinking that this may be useful…
