‘New Dawn’ and the Parliamentary Archives – Parliamentary Archives: Inside the Act Room
‘New Dawn’ is a major new permanent contemporary artwork by artist Mary Branson, celebrating the ‘Votes for Women’ movement in Parliament. It consists of 168 individually hand-blown glass ‘scrolls’, in the colours of the various women’s suffrage organisations, individually backlit to ebb and flow with the tidal Thames. And they were inspired by the Original Acts in the Victoria Tower.
The export figures from Heard Island and McDonald Islands are even more perplexing. The territory does have a fishery but no buildings or human habitation whatsoever. Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.
The stupidest chart you’ll see today – The Economist
Calculating reciprocal tariffs is hard. It takes years of determined study to get a PhD in trade economics. And you need teams of these types of wonks to come up with policies that will work. Scratch that. All that’s needed is an idiot, an AI chatbot, or some combination of the two. It took no more than a couple of hours after President Donald Trump announced the United States’ new reciprocal tariff rates for the commentariat to work out how exactly they had been arrived at.
The leaked Signal chat, annotated – The New York Times
Excerpts of a Signal chat published Monday by The Atlantic provide a rare and revealing look at the private conversations of top Trump administration officials as they weighed plans for U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. … President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the apparently accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in the chat, claiming that officials did not share classified information. However, Mr. Goldberg reported that highly sensitive military operational information was posted in the channel. The Atlantic did not publish those details.
Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.
Democrats can’t flashmob their way out of this one – Garbage Day
The best take on the Democrats’ behavior last night was from @KrangTNelson, who wrote on X, “If you think Trump is a fascist, like Hitler was, then you have to accept that [wearing pink] is a ridiculous thing to do. ‘In response to hitler’s policies, some members of the German Left Party wore purple hats.’ Do you see how stupid that sounds?”
Though, @jeffsharlet.bsky.social had an equally good take, writing on Bluesky, “No, Democrats, these little auction signs aren’t it. You’re acting like Wes Anderson characters who don’t understand that they’re in a Tarantino movie.”
America the evil mastermind? Not so fast, Russians are told – The New York Times
As President Trump turns decades of U.S. foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all. Almost overnight, it’s Europe — not the United States — that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative. On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel Sunday night, the anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world.” […]
The whiplash in ties with Washington was so stark that Russian state television on Sunday showed a reporter asking the Kremlin’s spokesman how it was possible that “a couple of months ago we were publicly saying that we were almost enemies.” “This, indeed, couldn’t have been imagined,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied, marveling at the shift. American foreign policy, he added, now “coincides with our vision in many ways.” […]
But for Mr. Putin himself, there may be a wisp of internal consistency in the swing toward Washington. He has generally avoided labeling the United States as a whole as Russia’s enemy. Rather, Mr. Putin has said it is the Western “neoliberal elite” that tries to impose its “strange” values on the world and seeks Russia’s destruction, while depicting American conservatives as Russia’s friends. It’s a mirror image of the propaganda tropes of the Soviet Union, when American progressives were cast as Moscow’s allies.
Serbian parliament erupts into chaos as opposition hurl smoke bombs and flares – Politico
“We believe that an exiting government cannot propose laws,” Radomir Lazović from the Green-Left Front said in an address before lawmakers released the gas bombs, leading to thick plumes of red smoke and smoke grenade clouds filling the national assembly. Fights broke out between MPs and two were injured after the speaker of parliament, Ana Brnabić, refused to interrupt the session and called the opposition “thugs and terrorist bandits who want to block the work of the institutions.”
We are dedicated to the American public. And we aren’t done yet. – 18F Group
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET. 18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.
Brooks and Capehart on the implications of Trump’s altercation with Zelenskyy – PBS News
What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia. […]
What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen. … And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.
Antiscientific vandalism – Quillette
To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.
The drift of things: David Goodman Croly’s Glimpses of the Future (1888) – The Public Domain Review
And some of the predictions do seem truly oracular, especially for a person writing in 1888. In terms of politics, Sir Oracle worries about “the accumulation of wealth in a few hands”, how “the middle class . . . will become reduced in numbers”, and a coming era when “there will be no more cheap land”. He suspects that “California is destined to have a dense population”; he believes that the US will soon annex Hawai‘i. He fears Germany above all other nations and speaks of “the coming international war”. In terms of foreign policy, he predicts that “the United States will some day take its place among the nations as a great power in international questions”; domestically, he worries that the postal service will be treated as a for-profit venture, when it should really operate as a public service. He foresees the successful opening of a Panama Canal, suspects that “the drift of things is towards the emancipation of women”, and worries that daily newspapers will be absorbed into journalistic monopolies. He augurs that the jet-setting age will soon be upon us: “If the aerostat should become as cheap for travellers as the sailing vessel, why may not man become migratory, like the birds, occupying the more mountainous regions and sea-coast in summer and more tropical climes in winter.” On the relation of the sexes, he laments — despite the civilizational benefits of monogamous marriage — that “we have promiscuity, polyandry, and polygamy right here in New York”, and suspects that these practices may one day become more socially tolerated. He has no time for one Mr. Fanciful, who suggests that narcotics akin to opium, nitrous oxide, and cocaine could one day allow us to actively control our dreams, and thus prevent a third of one’s life being lost to unproductive sleep.
“Recoup the costs” – Thinking About
The American demand is of an extraordinary scale. In Kyiv and again in Munich, the Americans proposed that Ukraine concede half of the profits from its mineral rights in perpetuity and from other national resources and from its ports in perpetuity with a lien on everything important — in exchange for essentially nothing. This is not really a monetary proposition, let alone a “deal,” but rather the demand that Ukraine become a permanent American colony. It amounts to blackmail enabled by ongoing Russian invasion. In effect, the United States is telling Ukraine to concede its resources to the United States, under the threat that American aid will be otherwise withdrawn, and those resources will be taken by Russia.
Sex scandals! Fights! Egos! Confessions of the chief whip – The Times
October 31: Among today’s HR joys is the report that a departmental Spad went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person’s head. To make matters worse, in a separate incident a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile and ended up having sex with a blow-up doll, for which he has been subsequently dismissed. Just another day at the office, I guess.
November 13: RS rings Suella [to sack her in the reshuffle]. After some token pleasantries all hell breaks loose. He puts her on speakerphone and everybody is listening in around the table, laden with discarded notes, open packets of No 10 biscuits and half-drunk cups of coffee. Once RS has made clear his intentions, there comes this ghastly ten-minute diatribe of vindictive and personal bile. It’s hard to know how to react at moments like this, or where to look. Part of me feels that this is a private call and that we are all eavesdropping, but the other part realises that for the protection of the PM and the government there needs to be a note taken and a record saved. So, we sit in astonished silence, doing our best not to grimace, smile or give any indication of what we feel.
The Soy Right needs a safe space – Dialectics of Decline
On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns. Instead of a revolt for a better world, people revolt over minor inconveniences. During the brief period of lockdowns in 2020, there were right wing riots at state capitols because people couldn’t get their hair cut for a couple weeks. The American populace is addicted to their dopamine slot machines and anything that threatens that is treated more severely than the actual threats to life on planet Earth that are all around us. This treatlerism is bipartisan — liberals and conservatives alike often direct more anger towards DoorDashers for an order mix up than towards our rulers who are currently preoccupied with destroying our lives.
From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem – MIT Technology Review
In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you. So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?
Google Calendar removes Pride Month, cultural heritage months – National Catholic Register
Before the change, Google Calendar users would automatically have the start of “Pride Month” listed on their calendars for June 1. In June, the secular observance celebrates homosexuality and transgenderism. For Catholics, the month of June is dedicated to celebrating the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Other observances that are no longer automatically displayed on Google Calendar include Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day, among others. It also included other celebrations unrelated to cultural identities, such as Teachers’ Day, which are no longer automatically listed on calendars.
Changes to cultural moments in Google Calendar – Google Keyword
Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of moments in a wide number of countries around the world — things like cultural celebrations, teachers days and many more. We got feedback that many other events and countries were missing, and it just wasn’t feasible to put hundreds of moments in everyone’s calendars — so in mid-2024 we made the decision to simplify and show only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com. Contrary to some of the comments on social media, this was not something we did just this year.
One user called the move “shameful” and said that the platform is being used to “capitulate to fascism.” Over the last few years, there have been comments and media reports complaining about the presence of the notes, but now they’re gone.
‘No to ethnic cleansing’: over 350 rabbis sign US ad assailing Trump’s Gaza plan – The Guardian
In a news release accompanying the ad, Spitzer, senior rabbi of congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts, said: “It is vitally important that we in the American Jewish community add our voices to all those refusing to entertain this insidious plan. Hitler’s dream of making Germany ‘Judenrein,’ ‘cleansed of Jews,’ led to the slaughter of our people.” “We know as well as anyone the violence that these kinds of fantasies can lead to. It is time to make the ceasefire permanent, bring all of the hostages home, and join in efforts to rebuild Gaza for the sake of and with the people who live there,” Spitzer added. […]
Rabbi Yosef Berman of the New Synagogue Project in Washington DC said Trump “seems to believe he is God with authority to rule, own, and dominate our country and the world”. “Jewish teaching is clear: Trump is not God and cannot take away Palestinians’ inherent dignity or steal their land for a real estate deal. Trump’s desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza is morally abhorrent. Jewish leaders reject Trump’s attempts to wring profit from displacement and suffering and must act to stop this heinous crime,” Berman added.
This is a still from Charles Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator. It occurs at approximately the 1:59:32 mark. If our home releases and prints are different, the most important context for this essay is that we discuss the split second before Charles Chaplin speaks the film’s final speech. […]
To be bold, to dare to be stupid: this single frame in The Great Dictator is the most essential frame occurring in Charles Chaplin’s filmography. It is the most elegant and achy navigation out of comedy, straight through tragedy, and into something like the human struggle ever captured by camera. It is something like the writing of resolution.
Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed – The Guardian
An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.
There is no going back – The New York Times
The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing. […]
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
Treasury official quits after resisting Musk’s requests on payments – The New York Times
Mr. Musk has been fixated on the Treasury system as a key to cutting federal spending. Representatives from his government efficiency initiative began asking Mr. Lebryk about source code information related to the nation’s payment system during the presidential transition in December, according to three people familiar with the conversations. Mr. Lebryk raised the request to Treasury officials at the time, noting that it was the type of proprietary information that should not be shared with people who did not work for the federal government. Members of the departing Biden administration were alarmed by the request, according to people familiar with their thinking. The people making the requests were on the Trump landing team at the Treasury Department, according to a current White House official.
I’m a federal worker. Elon Musk’s government data heist is the entire ballgame. – Slate
Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.
A 25-year-old with Elon Musk ties has direct access to the federal payment system – WIRED
A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration. WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk.
‘Scared and betrayed’ – workers are reeling from chaos at federal agencies – The Verge
It’s long been a strategy in Trump world to “flood the zone” with information, making it hard for the media and the public to know where to look, or where to concentrate their opposition. That feeling of disorientation is magnified for federal workers in the past couple weeks, as they wade through the eye of the storm. “These executive orders are flying fast and furious. I think that’s on purpose,” says one federal worker. “They’re giving agencies very little time to comply and even decide if they want to or not because there’s so much.” […]
“Nobody knows if they’ll have a job tomorrow, especially if your agency works on something that the Trump administration seems to be targeting,” says one federal worker. That might include anything from education to gender to climate-related issues. But even if they are fired, some workers are questioning if it would even be worth fighting for their jobs back. “This isn’t the job I loved and wanted,” says the DOL employee. “This is like some evil demon took it over.” […]
The crackdown on things like work from home or acknowledging gender has created an atmosphere of paranoia and hyper vigilance. Many federal employees have moved work-related conversations to encrypted messaging app Signal. And the tech industry’s embrace of right wing politics and politicians has created a sense of distrust, a federal contractor says, with people fearing that communication on other platforms could be leaked by pro-Trump companies.
Trump’s proposal to ‘take over’ Gaza sparks immediate rebukes – The New York Times
In the United States, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said that Mr. Trump’s proposal — which flies in the face of decades of debate over how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was meant to distract people from Elon Musk’s sweeping attempts to downsize the U.S. government on Mr. Trump’s behalf. “I have news for you — we aren’t taking over Gaza,” Mr. Murphy said on social media. “But the media and the chattering class will focus on it for a few days and Trump will have succeeded in distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”
Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.
Think Trumpism couldn’t take root and flourish in Britain? Think again – The Guardian
I wondered: when the government changed last year, did it make them feel any different about the future? “No,” said Emma, wearily. “We don’t expect anything out of what we’re told.” What if a Trump-type figure promised to make Britain great again? She laughed, and glanced at her partner. “We’ve got different opinions on that,” she said. “I kind of like what he’s doing. I wish more would be put into the UK. I think we need someone with a bit more of … an oomph about them.”
Ai Weiwei speaks out on DeepSeek’s chilling responses – Hyperallergic
Interestingly, when people tested this new AI tool by asking about me, it responded with, “Let’s talk about something else.” This is quite telling. Over the past decades, the Chinese Communist Party has employed a similar strategy—denying universally accepted values while actively rejecting them in practice. While it loudly proclaims ideals such as one world, one dream, in reality, it engages in systematic stealthy substitutions. […]
Ultimately, no matter how much China develops, strengthens, or even hypothetically becomes the world’s leading power—which is likely—the values it upholds will continue to suffer from a profound and inescapable flaw in its ideological immune system: an inability to tolerate dissent, debate, or the emergence of new value systems.
How does DeepSeek’s A.I. chatbot navigate China’s censors? Awkwardly. – The New York Times
The results of my conversation surprised me. In some ways, DeepSeek was far less censored than most Chinese platforms, offering answers with keywords that would often be quickly scrubbed on domestic social media. Other times, the program eventually censored itself. But because of its “thinking” feature, in which the program reasons through its answer before giving it, you could still get effectively the same information that you’d get outside the Great Firewall — as long as you were paying attention, before DeepSeek deleted its own answers.
How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war – The Guardian
What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?
Education Secretary gives Bett Show 2025 keynote address – GOV.UK
Over two thirds of those using generative AI in education say it’s having a positive impact. And we’re going further. Last week I announced that £1 million of funding has been awarded to 16 developers to help teachers with marking and tailored feedback for students. And my department continues to support the Oak National Academy, whose AI lesson assistant is helping teachers to plan personalised high quality lessons in minutes. And for children, that means more attention, higher standards, better life chances. For teachers, less paperwork, lower stress, fewer drains on their valuable time.
Using AI to reduce work or help unlock the recruitment and retention crisis that we face, so that once again teaching can be a profession that sparks joy, not burnout. Where teachers can focus on what really matters, teaching our children. But not just teachers. We need to support leaders and finance professionals in schools too. That’s what DfE connect is all about. A one stop shop for leaders and administrators. It’s already helping academies to manage their finances, and we’ve just released new features that will help them understand and access new funding.
Historical analogies are often misleading devices. But it is difficult not to be struck by the parallels between Harding’s early 20th century American nationalism and Donald Trump’s bid for the White House. For the latter’s success perhaps lies in it bringing back to the surface of the country’s political life a violent ethnic nationalism that was for years suppressed, but never wholly absent from the fabric of American culture.
A brief guide to Trump and the Spectacle – London Review of Books
Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, Make America Great Again; but his politics has to steer a course between those in his audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is, everything just described about empire.
Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House – The Guardian
Indeed, the description of an ogre above might – without too much modulation – be deftly repurposed as a set of character notes for the future actors who will no doubt play him. The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about “values” – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.
The Dalai Lama shares thoughts on China and the future in a new book – The New York Times
In the years since, he has watched with alarm as China has continued its efforts to force Tibetans to assimilate, using tactics that include placing Tibetan children in boarding schools where they learn in Mandarin and are taught that the Chinese liberated Tibetans from serfdom. He also delivers blunt criticism of China’s treatment of its own citizens. “Judging by Xi’s last decade in office, when it comes to individual freedom and everyday life, China seems to be reverting to the oppressive policies of Mao’s time, but now enforced through state-of-the-art digital technologies of surveillance and control,” he writes.
Washington DC residents flee ahead of Trump inauguration: ‘I can’t be here’ – The Guardian
“I have a fundamental set of beliefs and values that differ greatly from the supporters of the president-elect, so it is best that I just remove myself,” said Butler, a human resources executive who had worked for the federal government for nearly two decades before leaving to work at a non-profit. “It says to me that we’d rather have a criminal leading our country than a person of color, or a criminal rather than a woman.”
Tech right (disambiguation) – Jasmine Sun
I was most surprised to see that right-wing rebukes of the “Tech Right” are near-identical to those that left tech critics make (toward different ends). It makes you wonder, as Andreessen and Pethokoukis both pose, whether the more important division is not left/right but rather accel/decel.
It’s the racism, stupid – BuzzMachine
This is why it is so horribly wrong to hear the likes of Chris Matthews smugly declare on Morning Joe that identity politics is dead because identity politics are to blame for Harris’ loss. Can he not hear himself? The election of Trump is the product of identity politics: white identity politics, dismissing, disdaining, and threatening people of every other identity.
The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art – Harper’s Magazine
It was the most depressing exhibition I had ever seen at the gallery, hardly worth a visit, let alone losing one’s legs. While Unravel pretended to be politically radical—even revolutionary—it didn’t seem to stand for much beyond liberal orthodoxy and feel-good ambient diversity. It offered fantasies of resistance, but had little to offer in terms of genuine, substantive social change or artistic experimentation. The works were almost entirely produced with traditional methods and materials, in recognizable aesthetics, and might as well have dated from half a century ago, if not much earlier. […]
The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.
John Prescott, British former deputy prime minister, dies aged 86 – The Guardian
Blair recounted the moment Prescott punched the egg-throwing protester. “This caused a huge sort of fracas, obviously. We had to give a press conference in the election campaign the next day … I just said: ‘Well, John is John.’ And so was that supposed to be an answer? I said: ‘Yeah, that’s an answer, that’s as much as you can say.’”
“Subway Therapy” displays New Yorkers’ post-election thoughts – Hyperallergic
At the height of the project’s post-election popularity in 2016, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo left a note of his own: “New York State holds the torch high! – Andrew C.” Strangers left messages including “Trump is inhumane,” “Love to my Muslim brothers and sisters,” angry sentiments toward the electoral college, and the popular slogan “Love Trumps Hate.” Eight years later, the rhetoric hanging from the neon Post-it squares is different. While there was barely any room for even one more sticky note at the Union Square station in 2016, this year’s confessionals are more sparsely populated, and their messages seem less reactive to a Trump win.
Trump team reportedly getting fed up with Elon Musk’s weird behavior – Futurism
Musk is “behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one person familiar with the matter told NBC News. … “He’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory,” NBC’s source continued, speaking of Musk. “Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one.”
Elon Musk may already be overstaying his welcome in Trump’s orbit – NBC News
Musk traveled to Mar-a-Lago to watch the election returns come in last week, and he has been there much of the past week, the two sources said. They said he is there at all hours, sitting with Trump and joining calls and meetings. … The second person said that Musk has an “opinion on and about everything” and that he shares them so forcefully that he has begun to pester Trump insiders. “He wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t),” this source said.
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