Thomas Jones
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moonjets.bsky.social
Thomas Jones
@moonjets.bsky.social
600 followers 170 following 150 posts
I work @lrb.co.uk, most of my opinions are other people’s
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moonjets.bsky.social
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla (1912)
November 25, 2025 at 9:02 AM
moonjets.bsky.social
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
FIFTEEN DAYS AGO: 2706 people in Italy had at this point tested positive for Sars-CoV-2; there were 443 new cases; 276 had recovered; 107 were dead. The Italian government announced on Wednesday, 4 March that schools would be closed the following day, and would not reopen until Monday, 16 March. A week had passed since Ash Wednesday. It would have been neat if the beginning of quarantine had coincided with the first day of Lent. And not merely neat: it might well have saved lives. But lateness is one of the defining characteristics of the Covid-19 pandemic. The two-week incubation period is only one of the reasons we are stumbling too far behind the virus. The belief that 'it won't be like that here' is strong: it was strong in Italy - it was strong in me - when the disease was concentrated in China. When I talk to friends and family in the UK, it sometimes feels as if I'm speaking not only from another country, but from another time, 15 days in the future. In each of the Terminator movies, the time-travelling hero repeats a shibboleth: 'Come with me if you want to live.' The message in the real world, though, is 'Stay at home.'
November 20, 2025 at 9:20 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
This is one of the things I was trying to write about here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
LL OF THIS was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn't paying attention. Italy's last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the opening race of the Grand Prix season at Tigullio. The socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist death squad on 10 June 1924, nine days after Ferrari won the Circuito del Polesine in an Alfa Romeo RL SS. Antonio Gramsci was arrested on 9 November 1926. 'Enzo Ferrari spent 1926 in Modena,' Dal Monte writes. 'He was seen at football matches, cycling events and, in the winter months, even at ski events on the slopes of the Apennines.' What else was he supposed to do?
October 8, 2025 at 5:06 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
From a review of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021)

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
And then there's always a darker question lurking behind the one about whether or not robots can be people, and it isn't about robots but about people, and what it means when they - when we - treat others as if they weren't human. It is, or should be, troubling to realise that we have little difficulty not only in anthropomorphising computers, cars, toys or fictional characters, but also in dehumanising the people whose lives, sometimes but not always remote from our own, are instrumental to our happiness, or to our comfort.
October 5, 2025 at 5:44 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
Turns out Batman’s been around at least since Roman times
October 4, 2025 at 3:30 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
Something I wrote in 2018. The UK Labour Party could learn a lesson here but won’t.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/ma...
The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them. The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under 6ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best). People obsessed with immigration didn't vote for the PD; they voted for the Lega. Facts count for very little. Salvini insists on a connection between immigration and crime, even though statistics show that both overall crime, and crime committed by foreigners, have gone down over the last ten years, at the same time that the number of asylum permits issued has gone up.
September 28, 2025 at 1:08 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
‘the terrifying spectacle of power without a mind’ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...
Donald Trump cosplaying Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now: ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning... Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR’
September 6, 2025 at 8:34 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
It was generous of whoever parked their Ferrari outside a bookshop in Parma to provide this bit of free publicity for the @lrb.co.uk

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...
A black Ferrari (an F12, I think?) outside a bookshop in Parma with the campanile of the cathedral in the background lit by late evening light
August 31, 2025 at 7:02 AM
moonjets.bsky.social
wrt the Dade-Collier concentration camp, something I wrote in 2007 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...
London Review OF BOOKS And yet, however successfully it generates unease in the complacent reader, and for all its efficiency as a thriller, full of exciting chases, double-crosses, torture, escape and recapture, Fatherland is based on a flawed - and, despite the dystopian setting, unduly optimistic - premise: that the disclosure of the Final Solution by a worn-out cop and rookie journalist could threaten to destabilise a victorious world power and scupper the possibility of rapprochement between Germany and the United States. In the world Harris has created, the exposure of the Holocaust might provide a handy reason to back away from détente were America looking for such an excuse, but otherwise it would surely be tactfully ignored: governments, after all, have a knack for overlooking all kinds of human rights abuse, unless a cause for moral outrage happens to coincide with the national interest or the perpetrators have already been defeated and stripped of power.
July 6, 2025 at 1:49 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
Not the main thing here but still good to see Nadine Shah paraphrasing Lord Hoffmann at Glastonbury www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...
A screenshot of two BlueSky posts, one quoting the message from Artists for Palestine UK that Nadine Shah read out at Glastonbury, the other quoting a piece that Daniella Lock wrote a few days earlier for the LRB blog. The first says: ‘The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw the proscription of Palestine Action.’ The second says: ‘On the current picture, the real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s attempt to proscribe it.’
June 30, 2025 at 1:05 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
I took the food test in Italian and what is this abomination?
June 30, 2025 at 9:05 AM
moonjets.bsky.social
What this government will find money for and what it won’t.
Headlines from the Guardian UK to expand nuclear deterrent with US fighter jets capable of carrying warheads 30m ago Keir Starmer says government will stand firm on disability welfare overhaul 38m ago
June 24, 2025 at 10:05 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
‘exactly the sort of thing a foreign power tries to do to paralyse military activity’ speculates the Air Marshal, as if ‘foreign powers’ weren’t literally dropping kiloton bombs on each other as he speaks
From the Times Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, the UK's first director of joint warfare and now a fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, last week speculated that Russia or Iran influenced the attack at RAF Brize Norton. "It is certainly the sort of activity carried out by foreign agents and they could have influenced the activists," he said. "They (Russian or Iran] were either behind this or rubbing their hands with glee," he said. "This is exactly the sort of thing a foreign power tries to do to paralyse military activity."
June 23, 2025 at 9:46 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
I dunno, seems pretty definitive
A map painted in Italy in 1573-74 showing the Gulf of Mexico labelled Golfo Mexicano
May 15, 2025 at 10:21 AM
moonjets.bsky.social
The fun seems to have stopped some time before 2022
Glasman is enjoying a more relaxed role in public life these days. Amicably separated from Catherine, he now lives in a small flat in Dalston.
April 26, 2025 at 12:51 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
Also includes this about the late pope. Francis wasn’t all he’s cracked up to be in many ways (see LRB passim), but he was one of the few world leaders willing to insist – right to the end – on the humanity of people who cross borders undocumented.
On​ 8 July 2013, the newly elected Pope Francis, on his first official trip outside Rome, arrived by boat at the island of Lampedusa to commemorate the thousands of migrants who have died crossing from North Africa. After casting a wreath into the water, he celebrated mass on the sports field that doubles as a migrant reception centre. He delivered his homily from an altar constructed out of an old fishing boat. ‘Where is your brother?’ he asked.
April 22, 2025 at 9:04 AM
moonjets.bsky.social
My name is too generic and I stopped scrolling before I got to to me (if I’m even in there) but there’s some great sounding stuff I wish I’d written and it’s outrageous that Meta stole it from the other Thomas Joneses

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
March 20, 2025 at 8:18 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
A woman says in Italian: ‘since Mussolini’s been in charge the trains are on time, everything’s in order.’ A man replies: ‘but there was no need to make him head of the government, enough to make him stationmaster.’
March 15, 2025 at 12:34 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
Reminds of something I wrote years ago about Pynchon www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...
March 13, 2025 at 8:16 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/oc...
Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern.
February 16, 2025 at 6:03 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
December 2, 2024 at 7:07 PM
moonjets.bsky.social
‘You’ve nearly got it, Sir Keir. Now try it with your right arm. Straighten your elbow, put your fingers together and you’ll be there.’
September 16, 2024 at 11:38 AM