Media Theranos: The End of Ozy

I had left Ozy Media in 2017 without exercising my stock options, believing the likeliest outcome for the company was... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Love in a Dark Time

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@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Ten Million a Year – David Wallace-Wells on Polluted Air

Wherever you look, the earth is in flames. The residue is carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, black carbon,... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Screwed Over: Planned obsolescence, technology and capitalism

‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth’ may sound like a boast, but it’s a simple statement of... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Shebeen Queens: Review of “A World History of Women and Alcohol"

We require reproductive workers and feminised people in general to be on call, 24/7, just in case hubby or baby or the... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Place Is Pryson (2019)

Life as an anchoress began with a death. On entering their cell for the first time, the recludensus (novice recluse)... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Fetch the Chopping Knife: on Elizabethan True Crime

The first true crime craze – the distant antecedent of our own docu-drama craze – proved to be an essentially... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

The ‘R’ Word: Book Ownership in Stuart England

This is a counterhistory of using rather than reading, of books as artefacts that might furnish a room or build a legacy... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

I haven’t been I: on Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet is almost about philosophy; its tone is often casual and then deliberate. Pessoa loves aphorism,... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Outcasts and Desperados: On Richard Wright

Richard Wright wasn’t interested in the structures of support or mutual aid that enabled black people to survive as a... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Fake it till you make it: Review of “Index, A History of the”

The index gave its users formidable power to find and quote adages and examples, narratives and poems, scriptural and... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

The Sixth Taste

Perhaps kokumi will put an end to the misery of people who buy low-fat, low-salt food while secretly wishing they were... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Index, a history of the

The index gave its users formidable power to find and quote adages and examples, narratives and poems, scriptural and... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Who Owns the Oil?

Most firms operate as partnerships and, apart from Glencore, none has chosen to go public and expose itself to the... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

How to Track a Mammoth

Until twelve thousand years ago, mammoths roamed the northern hemisphere on the ‘mammoth steppe’, a huge expanse of... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Competition Is For Losers

How can a libertarian be comfortable cosying up to sovereign wealth funds, the military-industrial establishment and the... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

How to Get Rich

Most firms operate as partnerships and, apart from Glencore, none has chosen to go public and expose itself to the... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom: Spymasters

Scores of former agents have exposed CIA crimes and defeats in books, films and articles. In the wake of American... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

One French City

The city is built on a gentle slope, an outcropping of limestone, with the amphitheatre close to the top. There are... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

On Diego Rivera

Though billed as an optimistic vision of ‘Pan American Unity’, Rivera’s mural has an ominous quality: we can see... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom: Spymasters

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@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Where on Earth are you? · Frances Stonor Saunders (2016)

We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Detecting the Duchess: Serious Doper

The Russian state lab in Sochi was the official drug testing facility for the whole games. As head of the lab, Grigory... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Diana of the Upper Air

For​ a short while the highest point of the New York skyline was marked by a girl standing on tiptoe. At night she was... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

A Branching Story: Writing for a Computer Game

I had the constant sense that the next small edit would balance the whole thing out and I was always wrong. A branching... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Information Sovereignty

‘Traditional Russian spiritual-moral and cultural-historical values are under active attack from the USA and its... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Seven Centuries Too Late

It would be a pusillanimous reader who could not respond to the appeal of a cosmos so complete in every detail, arrayed... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Ten Small Raisins: early modern manuscript hunting

Correctors worked long hours, bent over proofs, smeared in thick ink. Scraping by on low wages, they lived alone in... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

More Husband Than Female

Female husbands expressed their masculinity through their choice of clothing, names, behaviours and, above all, their... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Ojai-Geeky-Too-LA

Eve Babitz navigates the city’s highs and lows during weekday mornings spent ‘maniacally’ roller-skating with her... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Most people think birds just go pi-pi-pi

The violin does a nightingale, the clarinet a blackbird. The movement does not develop in any way; the isorhythmic... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Types of Intuition: Thomas Nagel on human rights and moral knowledge

The question I am asking is whether, looking at ourselves from outside, we should come to view our attachment to rights... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

How peculiar it is: on Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey’s imagery is in debt to the Surrealists, and, at times, in its use of line, to Aubrey Beardsley, but... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

Fungi are diffuse, plastic beings: they reform themselves around the problem at hand. ‘Mycelium’, says Merlin... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Favourably Arranged

Ancient anatomists drew what scanty conclusions they could about the inner workings of humans from pigs and dogs;... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Biomass and Other Dubious Renewables

Part of the trouble is the idea that trees are just wood, wood is carbon, and carbon is fungible. Most of the wood... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Gargantuanisation

The shipping industry has worked hard to hide itself from view, and we have colluded with it. We don’t want to think... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 2 years ago

Walkers in the Ruined City

Antiquarians lamented that modern Romans had turned the Colosseum into a quarry. But they knew that greedy builders and... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

The People v. Bill Gates

Bill and Melinda Gates have asked for privacy after their divorce announcement, but a storm of attention seems more... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

Why Use a Novichok?

The logic behind using nerve agents in the Skripal and Navalny cases was that the target could be poisoned through... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

At Satoshi’s Tea Garden

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@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

The Gatekeeper

‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Paul... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

Book review on the history of modern Singapore

The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

I nearly became the world’s largest counterfeiter of Fabergé eggs

In 1999, while taking a break from my PhD to try to get rich in the fine jewellery business, I nearly became the world... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

The Socialist Lavatory League (2019)

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@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

Cookies, Pixels and Fingerprints

There is something unsettling – especially in the midst of a pandemic that has forced so much of commerce and everyday... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

Space Forces

Where are the space arks in orbit? The exploration of exoplanets in the circumstellar habitable zone? Satellite wars... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago

Populist Palatial: The View from Piccadilly

It is usual for urban centres to contain extreme contrasts and not unusual for them to be scenes of conflict. What is... | Continue reading


@lrb.co.uk | 3 years ago