Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Jenrick quitting over the Rwanda Bill not being strong enough is an equally telling moment. The 41-year-old Jenrick comes from the same well-mannered, centre-right Tory tradition as Sunak. He is in politics for the long haul and undoubtedly sees a return to full Cabinet rank as part of his personal career plan.

He was sent by Sunak to the Home Office to man mark that wild card Suella Braverman. But he came to see that she was right on the fundamentals of migration policy of both the legal and illegal varieties.

And now he has quit Sunak’s administration, resigning both on a point of principle and as a result of a calculated analysis about the future direction and likely reservoirs of support of the Conservative party.

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

for years now, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel have been saying this is a catastrophe — that it is a catastrophe for Israeli security, a catastrophe for Israeli democracy, a catastrophe for Israelis’ international standing, and a catastrophe for Israel’s soul. Their warnings seem quite prescient now.

they’ve argued there was another way. There was a huge amount Israel could do on its own and should have been doing, that if Israel is not going to tip into a kind of single state that it did not want and could not ultimately defend, that the conditions had to be created now for something else to emerge in the future.

One of the people working on that project was Nimrod Novik. He’s my guest today. Novik was a top aide to Shimon Peres when Peres was prime minister and vice premier. In that role, Novik was involved in all manner of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with the international community. He’s on the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, which is a group I mentioned a minute ago. And he’s an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum.

(CNN)Supreme Court officials are escalating their search for the source of the leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, taking steps to require law clerks to provide cell phone records and sign affidavits, three sources with knowledge of the efforts have told CNN.Some clerks are apparently so alarmed over the moves, particularly the sudden requests for private cell data, that they have begun exploring whether to hire outside counsel.

Lawyers outside the court who have become aware of the new inquiries related to cell phone details warn of potential intrusiveness on clerks' personal activities, irrespective of any disclosure to the news media, and say they may feel the need to obtain independent counsel.

Sources familiar with efforts underway say the exact language of the affidavits or the intended scope of that cell phone search -- content or time period covered -- is not yet clear. The Supreme Court did not respond to a CNN request on Monday for comment related to the phone searches and affidavits.The young lawyers selected to be law clerks each year are regarded as the elite of the elite. (Each justice typically hires four.) They are overwhelmingly graduates of Ivy League law schools and have had prior clerkships with prominent US appellate court judges.

The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike the United States, analysts say.

Libya’s electoral commission decided that no such vote could take place for numerous reasons. The presence of foreign forces on Libyan soil was unquestionably one of the delicate factors, adding complexity and controversy to the now-postponed election scheduled for December 24.

Turkey’s military or Russia’s Wagner Group will leave the country in the foreseeable future.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman is truly a wonder.  On the face of it it is a series of essays, both short and long, that attempt to make some sense of the 1990’s in the United States.  But if you were looking for a dry rendition of those ten years, you are looking in the wrong place with this book.

What one ends up with Klosterman is a work of synthesis, that is both funny and thoughtful and ultimately a wild ride through the mind of a highly intelligent and amusing political, historical and sociological chronicler.

Klosterman the author sees the Nineties life as more than any person or event but as an adversarial relationship between people without the unseemliness of their seeming to try too hard.  This was no doubt the case due to the fact that it was an easy time to live before the rise of polarizing issues.  At this time there was no way to verify facts but then again it wasn’t considered essential.  American life was underwhelming.  We controlled technology rather than they us.  It was the golden age of newspapers and we had a collective obsession with popular culture.  The Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union had dissolved.  What could possibly go wrong?

BRUSSELS — The United States announced a package of new sanctions against Russia and further aid for Ukrainian refugees as President Joe Biden looked to rally the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies to increase their efforts to help Ukraine in a series of high-stakes meetings.

with a focus on those who are most vulnerable. The administration is also prepared to offer more than $1 billion in additional funding toward humanitarian assistance and $11 billion over the next five years to address worldwide food security threats after the disruptions to the Russian and the Ukrainian agricultural industries.

While the U.S. announced new efforts around sanctions and refugees, it made no new military commitments — despite pleas from Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures

the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.

I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media

it’s necessary to understand the legal ambiguities that now exist on campus. “No person in the United States,” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states, “shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” There is no corresponding federal prohibition on discrimination on the basis of religion.

The problem is immediately obvious. Jewishness doesn’t fit neatly into any of those three categories. Israelis of all races, religions and ethnicities are protected because of their national origin, but what about American Jews? Judaism is a religion, and religion isn’t covered. Jewishness is more of an ancestry than a “race” or a “color” — there are Jews of many races and colors.

There is an answer to the problem. Congress should pass legislation clearly stating that antisemitism is included in the scope of Title VI.

A survey earlier this month suggested that only a fifth of voters are currently satisfied with the chancellor’s work – the worst result recorded since this type of polling began a quarter of a century ago

If they could pick a chancellor from any political party, only 5 per cent said they would choose Scholz.

This year has also been a difficult one for Germans.

These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologized. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim Philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, P.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin).

this miscellany ends in 2002. That was the year Hitchens, previously a self-described “extreme leftist,” came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He broke with The Nation, The London Review of Books and many of his old friends.

Why care about a pile of old book reviews? Hitchens’s didn’t sound like other people’s. He had none of the form’s mannerisms. He rarely praised or blamed; instead, he made distinctions, and he piled up evidence

I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after

I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that

All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.

Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.

Damon Linker has the most thoughtful meditation I’ve read on Aaron Bushnell, the airman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy this weekend.

before we get to that, I want to put in front of you Linker’s definition of small-l liberalism:

I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.

he traces the affiliations, rivalries and intellectual spats among the eminences of mid-20th-century philosophy at Oxford: Gilbert Ryle, A.J. Ayer, J.L. Austin, R.M. Hare, Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Strawson

All these thinkers focused their considerable intellectual powers on doing something similar to what I’ve done above: analyzing the words people use to probe the character and limits of how we perceive and understand the world. Such “linguistic philosophy” aimed, in Krishnan’s formulation, “to scrape away at sentences until the content of the thoughts underlying them was revealed, their form unobstructed by the distorting structures of language and idiom.”

‘What’s the good of having one philosophical discussion,’ he told her once. ‘It’s like having one piano lesson.’”