We are living in the age of the nonagenarian: the Queen continues to gain popularity against her elected officials, and Rupert Murdoch has been given everything he’s ever asked for, just a few weeks from his 91st birthday. In between meetings in Saudi Arabia, Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, announced the removal of legal restrictions designed to prevent the media mogul from interfering in the editorial independence of the Times and the Sunday Times, hurdles put in place by Margaret Thatcher when he bought the newspapers in 1981…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/16/rupert-murdoch-times-sunday-times-boris-johnson

Marina Hyde: The question every politician should be asking is, what does Mark Zuckerberg want with us?

Lynn Parramore: The perverted dreams of western modernity and capitalism may be exhausting themselves

Paul Sagar – The last hollow laugh – Francis Fukuyama and ‘The End of History’

Book review: The Government of Desire

Dilip Simeon: What is corruption?

Tanya Gold – How materialism makes us sad

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Facebook has just suffered its most devastating PR catastrophe yet / Jonathan Freedland: Is Facebook the tobacco industry of the 21st century?

 

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever” – George Orwell’s Final Warning

George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)

George Orwell – Freedom of the Park (1945)

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

J.K. Rowling asks us to remember George Orwell

Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)

ALEX ROSS – Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.

Saladdin Said Ahmed: Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism

Theodor Adorno – Education After Auschwitz (1966)

Milan Kundera’s use of Kitsch