Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian:
Think Anthony Bourdain and a whole rush of TV memories flood back. There he is – in shows such as Parts Unknown and No Reservations – a gonzo gourmand trekking to backstreet nooks and favela hideouts in parts of the world where celebrity chefs fear to tread. In Beirut and Congo; savouring calamari and checking out graffiti in Tripoli; slurping rice noodles and necking bottles of cold beer with Barack Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam. One course follows another, evenings drift past midnight and he’s still chewing the fat with locals, hungry for stories – about drugs, dissidence, gristly local politics.
But Bourdain, who killed himself aged just 61 in 2018, had always seen himself as a writer. His mother was an editor at the New York Times, and his youthful crushes were mostly beatniks and outlaws – Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lester Bangs, Hunter S Thompson. (Orwell too – especially his account of a dishwasher’s life in Down and Out in Paris and London.) A college dropout, he later signed up for a writing workshop with famed editor Gordon Lish. His earliest bylines appeared in arty, downtown publications; two crime novels (Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo) got decent reviews but sold poorly.
Things turned around after the publication in 2000 of his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential. It portrayed New York’s restaurants as sweatshops, military trenches, last chance saloons for a whole bevy of social misfits. For Bourdain they were refuges.
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Zohran Mamdani, as most readers know by now, is the son of a filmmaker, Mira Nair. His parents met while she was working on Mississippi Masala (1992); his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor of international affairs and anthropology who had lived through the events from the 1970s described in the film.
Of all the sins that might damn your soul for eternity, mumbling is probably pretty far down the list. Still, in medieval Europe, there was a demon for that: 
Mr. Mamdani, who campaigned on sweeping promises, can build a more positive legacy by focusing on tangible accomplishments. He should take notes from successful mayors, moderate and progressive alike, including 
LONG BEFORE ELON 
“Go ahead, tell the end, but please don’t tell the beginning!” begs the movie poster for the 1966 film Gambit. Why would the filmmakers prefer to blow the ending rather than beginning?
When forests are cleared, wetlands drained, and slopes destabilized, entire ecosystems lose their balance. Floods, landslides, and erosion then hit both communities and wildlife alike.
You remember the scene: A camera at a Coldplay concert is showing audience members enjoying the show, with lead singer Chris Martin making a few friendly comments about each fan. The camera cuts to an attractive middle-aged couple in the midst of a cute embrace, with the man holding the woman from behind as they sway to the music. Then the couple spots the Jumbotron, and a perfectly choreographed series of panicked actions unfolds. The woman, shocked, covers her face, and turns away from the camera. The man dives to his left, out of the camera’s view. A younger woman, sitting behind them, and evidently in the know about what is happening, comes into view, the look on her face a poetic mix of horror and glee. “Oh, what?” Martin comments. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
In a 1990 review
How can whole societies come to believe that the dead walk among them? Understanding that requires moving beyond theoretical approaches and engaging with tangible human communities and their world-views. We will first visit two very different societies in which the veil between life and death has been thin. The dead have been close: sometimes to be revered, sometimes to be feared, but regularly to be interacted with, if not unambiguously in a bodily form. Both case-studies manifest an endemic layer of anxiety, capable of intensifying under stress into something more concentrated and physical.
We associate Freud with the repression of thoughts and feelings. But he also described a subtler defense: recognizing an uncomfortable truth, yet acting as if it didn’t matter—a phenomenon he called disavowal. In this interview, philosopher Alenka Zupančič, a close collaborator of Slavoj Žižek, argues that disavowal is the key to understanding our political paralysis. From climate change to populism to the performative outrage of social media, Zupančič says the problem isn’t that we deny reality—it’s that we acknowledge it endlessly and keep doing nothing.
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