Category Global

Evidence of nothing much

When France beat Belgium in the semifinals, it became obvious to me that France deserved to win the World Cup and would likely do it. Belgium had one of the best teams I’d ever seen, and yet they were completely…

Modo bos, modo vulpes

Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist. Yes, Australia – but Donald Trump’s election affected her adversely, too, by ruining her fitness routine for more than a year. I suppose she wrote this piece with her tongue in…

And what did you expect?

Oliver Carroll, The Independent‘s man in Moscow, tweeted this on Tuesday, the day when England played against Columbia at the Spartak Stadium in the north-west of Moscow: So far the Colombians have offered salsa, carnival, indigenous music, pantomime and fantastic…

The skulls of the Templo Mayor

More than once, I’ve read that the pre-Columbian Aztec civilization was so blood-curdlingly homicidal that History herself blessed its destruction by the conquistadors. I used to suspect that the underlying assumptions were unsound, relying on exaggerations by self-interested Spanish chroniclers.…

The Stanford Prison Performance

Experiments in social science are never fully replicable because humans are never fully replicable. These experiments yield scenarios, not proofs. They show how things could go, not how they invariably turn out. On the flip side, there’s a lot to…

“Mary Postgate”

Kipling placed The Beginnings at the end of his 1917 miscellany, A Diversity of Creatures. To the reader, the poem might seem a postscript to the short story Mary Postgate, which is the next-to-last piece in the collection. The story…

Real buttonholes

In The Secret Vice (1966), Tom Wolfe claimed: There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton the…

“Maoist positions”

Maria Dimitrova writes on the LRB blog: In Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language (2015), Julia Kristeva is cast as a spy for Bulgarian intelligence, responsible for the death of Roland Barthes. Last Tuesday, the Bulgarian Dossier Committee,…

Rhyming like a pharmacist

Innokenty Annensky wrote in The Second Book of Reflections (1909, Brand-Ibsen, pp. 173-179): Perhaps what’s captivating in Brand is that Brand does not fear being a psychological absurdity from time to time, that we’re judging Brand, marvel at him, go…

A nasty anecdote

Some three weeks ago, Himadri (the Argumentative Old Git) wrote about the change in his perception of Bruckner’s symphonies, which he used to love as a young man: But it struck me recently that it has been a long time…

“Oddly overlooked aesthetic connections”

As I’ve said, James Panero’s recent piece on the painter Andrew Wyeth does not seem particularly well-reasoned to me. Nevertheless, it does a service to the reading public as it points out that painters can be influenced by filmmakers, not…