First posted December 3, 2016 Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion By Gareth Stedman Jones; Reviewed by Jeremy Adelman While Jenny was dying, Marx wrote a letter to the Russian Group for the Emancipation of Labour in Geneva on the question: was communal property good? Stedman Jones ends Karl Marx with a story about the fate of… Read More Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Kasia Delgado First posted September 7, 2019 Vladimir was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour. Ivanna was Prisoner 108, and his secret correspondent. She looks back on a love affair with a man she never met In 1953, a young Ivanna Maszczak trudged through the Siberian labour camp in which she was serving a 10-year… Read More ‘I longed for the moment you would write’: The Gulag penpals whose love lasted 60 years
Ben Okri NB: This is a fascinating meditation, not merely on the Queen, but on God, monarchy, twentieth-century history and impermanence. Not to mention our regard for sheer human decency. Well written sir. DS Monarchs have passed away before, but there is something special which Queen Elizabeth has done, which makes it harder for the… Read More Queen Elizabeth was part of our psyche
New research shows small gestures matter even more than we may think. By Catherine Pearson In late August, Erin Alexander, 57, sat in the parking lot of a Target store in Fairfield, Calif., and wept. Her sister-in-law had recently died, and Ms. Alexander was having a hard day. A barista working at the Starbucks inside the… Read More The Unexpected Power of Random Acts of Kindness
Michael Amoruso I pray for friends I’ve lost, family, like my uncle who passed away,’ Bruno told me. We were chatting in the nave of the Church of the Santa Cruz of the Souls of the Hanged, a small Catholic church in central São Paulo. Built near the old city gallows, regulars go there to… Read More Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence
NB: Well spoke. I feel the same way about the use of ‘fuck‘ and ‘fucking‘ as force multipliers in speech, not to mention ‘shit‘ as in ‘get your shit together‘, etc etc. And as for ‘narrative‘ as a substitute for every verbal enunciation, including ‘version‘, ‘story‘, ‘account‘, ‘description‘, the less said the better. We can… Read More When did everything become ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing’? I blame the Americans
We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot धोखा है इक फ़रेब है मंज़िल का हर ख़याल, सच पूछिए तो सारा सफ़र वापसी का है – राजेश रेड्डी NB: Sentences, books… Read More Beginnings and Endings
Lois Beckett in San Diego What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict For decades, the southern California writer Mike Davis has obsessively documented the dark side of the Golden state – its wildfires, earthquakes, megalomaniac real estate developers and violent police departments. In… Read More Mike Davis, California’s ‘prophet of doom’, on activism in a dying world: ‘Despair is useless’
I know he had unusual eyesWhose powers no orders could determineNot to mistake the men he sawAs others did, for gods or vermin (Thomas Gunn, on a German soldier who risked his life to save Jews from deportation to the camps. Cited by Terry Eagleton, in Ideology, Verso, 1991, 2007; p xxii). What persuades men… Read More Evil
After the truth-shower 