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Issue 47.23/24 is online now, featuring:

Amia Srinivasan’s LRB Winter Lecture on psychoanalysis and politics
John Lanchester on AI
@kitchenbee.bsky.social on Judy Garland
Andrew O’Hagan on Walter Lippmann
Jacqueline Rose on Netanyahu
and T.J. Clark on a kouros at the Met.

Read now at www.lrb.co.uk
‘Bourgeois described one piece as sporting “dear little labial accents”. “Have you ever seen latex used better?” she asked.’

Jo Applin on the connection between Louise Bourgeois’s New York house and her latex work.

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Jo Applin · Diary: Louise Bourgeois’s Suitcase
In September​, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise...
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December 26, 2025 at 5:50 PM
In the latest episode of Aftershock, Daniel Soar, @tomstevenson.bsky.social and Alex de Waal discuss financial warfare as a legacy of the War on Terror.

Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...
Episode 5: In Dollars We Trust
Podcast Episode · Aftershock: The War on Terror · EP5 · 59m
podcasts.apple.com
December 26, 2025 at 5:32 PM
‘There is an inescapable austerity to Howe’s lyricism – a Puritan insistence on abstraction, a poetry without ligatures, even as the elegiac tone grows stronger over the books of the last decade.

Ange Mlinko on American poet Susan Howe.

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Ange Mlinko · Scattered Alphabet: On Susan Howe
Reading the work​ that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of...
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December 26, 2025 at 5:10 PM
‘Paracelsus, a vicious critic of Galenic doctors (“a misbegotten crew of approved asses”), transformed the field of alchemy by instructing his peers to make medicines, not gold.’

Nick Richardson on alchemy.

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Nick Richardson · Puffing on the Coals: Alchemical Art
Chemical reactions reflect human dramas, which reflect celestial movements, which reflect the mind of the divine. The...
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December 26, 2025 at 3:30 PM
‘For​ Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist as dark blue hessian.’

Susannah Clapp reviews ‘The Madman’s Orchestra’.

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Susannah Clapp · Not Quite Music
In The Madman’s Library, Edward Brooke-Hitching asked if a work of literature written on a shirt could be called a...
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December 26, 2025 at 2:14 PM
‘In the right circumstances, a popular rebellion against an unfit king would be an act of virtue. James never accepted this. Instead, he believed that tyranny had to be suffered “without resistance, but by sobs and tears to God”.’

Alice Hunt on James VI and I.

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Alice Hunt · Out of Rehab: Two Kings or One?
The 400th anniversary of James VI and I’s death has been marked by several new approaches to the reign that gave us...
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December 26, 2025 at 1:30 PM
‘Editors silently rewrote passages that seemed tawdry, or just left them out; it was routine to excise Pepys’s sexual escapades while preserving his wife’s rages, which just made her seem unhinged.’

@deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Samuel Pepys’s diary.

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Deborah Friedell · Lifted Up: Pepys Deciphered
Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper. Into his diary’s pages went social debts (who...
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December 26, 2025 at 12:50 PM
‘Years after his book appeared, the Palestinian leadership gambled on civil rights, international law and non-violent co-existence as a balkanised state alongside Israel. This did not pay off either.’

Jeremy Harding on a reissued portrait of 1970s Palestinian life.

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Jeremy Harding · Something Shameful: Britain and the Palestinians
To read The Palestinians nearly half a century later is to recognise that the many defeats the Palestinian population...
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December 26, 2025 at 12:10 PM
‘If, in January, it could be argued that the jury was still out on a relatively new government, by December that verdict has hardened. Starmer vies with Macron for the accolade of least popular European leader.’

@piercepenniless.bsky.social on the state we’re in.

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James Butler · Short Cuts: Labour’s Complacency
The few optimists in Labour claim that polling numbers aren’t meaningful this far from an election: faced with a...
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December 26, 2025 at 10:50 AM
‘Running through the heart of Netanyahu’s philosophy is the question of power.’

Jacqueline Rose on her encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Jacqueline Rose · When the Messiah Comes: When I met Netanyahu
Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without...
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December 26, 2025 at 9:38 AM
‘Perhaps one in ten West Papuans has been a refugee in the last five years.

By clearing Indigenous people from their land, the TNI both eases the extraction process and seeds future conflict: displacement allows extraction which leads to further displacement.’

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Douglas Gerrard | Escalation in West Papua
The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the West Papua...
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December 26, 2025 at 8:21 AM
‘Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which?’

Michael Wood on the philosopher of science.

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Michael Wood · Spellbound Gloaming: Bachelard’s Dreamwork
Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with...
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December 25, 2025 at 8:30 PM
‘In 1932, Wisconsin accounted for half of all US cheese production, with a great proportion of it controlled by a single company, Kraft. So it makes sense, in Pynchonworld, that behind everything must be a vast cheese conspiracy.’

Daniel Soar on 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘸 𝘛𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵.

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Daniel Soar · Land of Milk and Cheese: Pynchon’s World
The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however...
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December 25, 2025 at 7:10 PM
after
the argument drove past when all
I really wanted to say was ‘look at that horse’ well
maybe not 𝘢𝘭𝘭 I wouldn’t be this fluffed up if it were 𝘢𝘭𝘭 would I
I wouldn’t be passing for sane

‘Lieu Vague’, a poem by Anne Carson.

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Anne Carson · Poem: ‘Lieu Vague’
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December 25, 2025 at 5:50 PM
‘When Suleyman is not busy “bashing unbelievers” in The Golden Throne, he is sacking people for rudeness or watching prisoners be trampled by elephants.’

Helen Pfeifer on Suleyman the Magnificent.

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Helen Pfeifer · Turn around and run: Suleyman the Magnificent
There is murder, sex, duplicity and betrayal, all taking place at the court of one of the richest and most powerful...
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December 25, 2025 at 5:10 PM
‘To understand the greatness of Judy Garland, don’t start with 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘻, where the effect of watching and hearing her sing “Over the Rainbow” a mere five minutes in is so exquisitely intense that it’s hard to retain your critical faculties.’

Bee Wilson:

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Bee Wilson · Two Pins and a Lollipop: Judy Garland’s Greatness
To be a Garland fan is to have the illusion that you can save her from the wounds of the world, even as her voice and...
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December 25, 2025 at 3:30 PM
‘The colour of the stone – the nakedness of the stone, the play between fleshiness and stoniness – was everything.’

T.J. Clark views a kouros at the Met.

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T.J. Clark · A Kouros at the Met
The kouros in the Met was almost certainly a soldier: he has stepped out of his armour into his skin. The idea of...
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December 25, 2025 at 2:09 PM
‘The shamans of Siberia used the mushroom fly agaric to achieve ecstatic trances, drinking the urine of reindeer that had browsed on it. Our own Father Christmas may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult.’

Charles Nicholl on St Nick’s trippy past, from the archive.

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December 25, 2025 at 1:30 PM
‘Walter Lippmann was early to the table when it came to explaining that reality is not a choice one might make, not a thing to opt in and out of as suits your self-interest, but a bulwark against propaganda and censorship.’

Andrew O’Hagan on the liberal journalist.

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Andrew O’Hagan · Fatal Realism: Walter Lippmann’s Warning
People reading newspapers, Lippmann observed, were not offended by stories of unfairness and corruption, they were...
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December 25, 2025 at 12:51 PM
‘I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality.’
— Rousseau

@adamwithbooks.bsky.social on singularity as something we all have in common.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...
Adam Smyth | Like No One in Existence
In September, I invited people to record themselves reading a short passage from an English translation of Rousseau’s...
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December 25, 2025 at 12:34 PM
‘There​ is a difference, I want to suggest, between allowing a rational fear of domination to shape our politics, and making that fear the totality of our politics.’

Amia Srinivasan on psychoanalysis, in her Winter Lecture of Friday 12 December.

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Amia Srinivasan · The Impossible Patient: Return of the Unconscious
You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably...
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December 25, 2025 at 12:10 PM
‘Father Christmas marks the difference between little children who can be fooled and adults who cannot. The secret of his non-existence is the secret of the initiation rite.’

Wendy Doniger on an anthropological view of Christmas, in the archive.

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December 25, 2025 at 10:49 AM
‘The value of the world’s top ten companies is $25.6 trillion. Of that, $15.1 trillion has accumulated since 30 November 2022 and is directly linked to the AI boom.’

John Lanchester on the AI bubble.

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John Lanchester · King of Cannibal Island: Will the AI bubble burst?
Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in...
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December 25, 2025 at 9:39 AM
‘I came across an American whom I had seen a few times in the corner shop. He said Merry Christmas to me. It was like meeting a fellow-traveller in a far-off country.’

Iqbal Ahmed on Christmas as a ‘castaway’ in Britain, from the archive.

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December 25, 2025 at 8:15 AM
On shoegaze:

‘The volume on all those guitars was meant to shut the world out, to create a safe space behind high, thick walls of sound. And it seemed to carry no broader message, or social force: it wasn’t necessarily anything except its musical self.

Till now.’

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Stephanie Burt | Shoegazing
Remember shoegaze? If you’re under forty you won’t, though you might have come across it later. It’s the rock...
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December 24, 2025 at 9:10 PM