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Silicon Valley Warriors
Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and increasingly to tech firms such as Space X and Palantir.…
Published on 2 months, 1 week ago
The Best French Novel of the 20th Century
Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel o…
Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago
Is this fascism?
‘How useful is it,’ Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?’ In this episode of the podcast Daniel joins TJ to explo…
Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Close Readings: Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator'
In this extended extract from their series 'Conversations in Philosophy', part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at one of Friedrich Nietzsche's early essays, 'Sch…
Published on 2 months, 4 weeks ago
Old Pope, New Pope
‘The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how the new pope will have to navigat…
Published on 3 months ago
In the Soviet Archives: a conversation with Sheila Fitzpatrick
When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’, of a system …
Published on 3 months, 1 week ago
How They Built the Pyramids
In 2013, a group of French and Egyptian archaeologists discovered of cache of papyri as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Some of the texts were written by people who had worked on the pyramids: a ta…
Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago
Cold War Pen-Pals
The Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in 1941 to foster connections with Allied countries and encourage British and US women to ‘invest personally’ in the war effort. Two years later, …
Published on 3 months, 4 weeks ago
Close Readings: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout…
Published on 4 months ago
Conceiving Pregnancy
It's now possible to take a home pregnancy test eight days after ovulation, yet in the 16th century, women sometimes turned to astrologers for confirmation. And in the 1950s and 1960s, one might send…
Published on 4 months, 1 week ago