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The Debt to David Graeber
When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bul…
Published on 2 months ago
What’s so great about Formula One?
Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and times of Enzo Ferrari. In this episode, they disc…
Published on 2 months, 1 week ago
Close Readings: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow…
Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago
The Psychology of Tennis
As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently in the LRB: ‘obsessive focus, epic self-belief’. …
Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Why you should care about golf
With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. When Donald Trump was spotted cheating recently on …
Published on 2 months, 4 weeks ago
Close Readings: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fictio…
Published on 3 months ago
Rat Universes
The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled en…
Published on 3 months, 1 week ago
Pinochet and the Nazis
Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany. …
Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago
Israel's War of Opportunity
Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict appa…
Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago
Close Readings: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in diffe…
Published on 4 months ago