James Stafford in Dissent:
In the next British general election, due to happen within the year, the Labour Party is set to sweep into power after fourteen years in opposition. Its two major rivals, the Conservative Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP), have imploded in scandal and division. The financial meltdown unleashed by the forty-nine-day tenure of former Prime Minister Liz Truss propelled Labour to a commanding position in national opinion polls, one that her successor, Rishi Sunak, has been unable to dent at the time of writing. A police investigation into misappropriation of donations and the resignation of First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon have undermined the SNP at a moment when the pandemic, war, and Conservative vulnerability have made the case for independence seem far less pressing than it did a decade ago. Local council and by-election results from the rural shires of Yorkshire to the satellite towns of Glasgow suggest that Labour is advancing on all fronts.
After national elections in 2015 and 2019 saw Labour routed in many of its former heartlands in Scotland and northern England, it’s a relief to see that post-Brexit predictions of a permanent, U.S.-style electoral realignment on questions of culture and identity were wide of the mark. Ever since the 2017 general election, when Jeremy Corbyn was carried to the gates of Downing Street by a wave of anti-austerity sentiment, large sections of the British electorate have been loudly demanding an end to the relentless cuts to public services—and the increases in taxation and cost of living—that have defined Conservative rule.
More here.
O
I
Lagos is an experience of a lifetime. The city will enchant and wreck you. The bedlam. The 15-minute journeys that stretch to five hours because of traffic jams. The multitudes everywhere you turn, each individual fizzing with hope and energy and stories, each unfazed by the maladies of living here — crumbling infrastructure, an oppressive kleptocratic government, the daily whiff of disasters brewing.
Nuclear weapons
But is your brain active even when you’re zoning out on the couch?
When used properly, metaphors enhance speech. But correctly dosing the metaphorical spice in the dish of language is no easy task. They ‘must not be far-fetched, or they will be difficult to grasp, nor obvious, or they will have no effect’, as Aristotle already noted nearly 2,500 years ago. For this reason, artists – those skilled enhancers of experience – are generally thought to be the expert users of metaphors, poets and writers in particular.
Robert Cumming, a pioneering wizard of West Coast photo-conceptualism, died in 2021, at the age of seventy-eight. He achieved brief semi-stardom in the nineteen-eighties, when he mounted solo exhibitions at both moma and the Whitney, but he failed to achieve the kind of lasting fame accorded to his close contemporaries in the L.A. scene, like Ed Ruscha, the master of deadpan Pop, or John Baldessari, Ruscha’s wackier counterpart, or even Cumming’s close friend and studio-mate William Wegman. Posthumously, though, Cumming has been experiencing a much deserved mini-revival. At Jean-Kenta Gauthier gallery, in Paris, a recent three-part series of exhibitions amounted to something like a retrospective. A new book, “Very Pictorial Conceptual Art,” edited by the writer and curator David Campany, collects Cumming’s photographic work from 1968 until 1980. The filmmaker Noah Rosenberg is making a feature-length documentary on Cumming, “On Closer Inspection,” a truncated version of which screened during this year’s Paris Photo art fair.
For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Black athletes were forbidden from competing as professional athletes. But trailblazers like Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson slowly chipped away at color barriers in American sports and opened up the floodgates for today’s stars to thrive.
Robert Irwin died a few months ago. He was 95 years old, so this was not a great tragedy. I didn’t know the man personally, but I have the sense that he lived a good and fulfilled life. He was quite famous within the more or less refined corners of the international artworld. He’ll probably always be most associated with the so-called Light and Space Movement that emerged in California, more properly southern California, in the late 1960s. Judy Chicago also did important works from within the Light and Space sensibility. James Turrell. Mary Corse. If these names mean anything to you. Quite fine if they don’t.
On Sunday, a report from the 
I first came across Friedrich Schiller and his work in the aftermath of the revolution in Zanzibar in January 1964. Among the victorious insurgents was a left-leaning group called the Umma Party. There is a long tale to be told about the formation of this group and its fate. In the early 1960s, members of the Umma, right under the eyes of the British colonial administration, went off to Cuba for military training. The connection with Cuba meant that the Umma had friends and supporters in the Soviet bloc of nations. After the revolution, the group had significant influence in the new power-balance in the government. It was no doubt through the influence of the Umma faction, as well as through expediency, that the post-revolutionary government invited or accepted the fraternal assistance of the ‘socialist’ group of nations.
Cancer cells
On this page, you will be introduced to 15 black authors that will have their names forever ingrained in history and their books read by millions worldwide.