‘The problem is that we are now recycling so much stuff that it’s impossible to recycle it all.’ @brettchristophers.bsky.social reviews three new books on the problem of trash, including 𝘞𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 by Oliver Franklin-Wallis and Alexander Clapp’s 𝘞𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦 𝘞𝘢𝘳𝘴. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a “classical” search engine like Google in the 2000s and 2010s took you outside itself, and perhaps prompted you to evaluate what you found there.’ Donald MacKenzie on Google’s future: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in states that have disappeared from Europe since 1990: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and above all the Soviet Union.’ Holly Case: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Issue 47.21 is now online, featuring: David Runciman on the depopulation problem John Kerrigan on the Atlantic slave trade Donald MacKenzie on the future of Google Holly Case on Habsburg legacies @brettchristophers.bsky.social on waste and a poem by @joriegraham.bsky.social. Read at www.lrb.co.uk

‘The Ghanaians I met wanted to become rich like the Americans and Europeans they contacted online. Convincing people thousands of miles away to hand over their riches was just what it took to get ahead.' Alexander Clapp on the professional ‘pig-butchering’ industry: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘During​ a four or five-year period at the turn of the millennium, I went to the cinema around six hundred times. I wasn’t a film critic or even an aspiring director. I was just a schoolboy and, in my parents’ probably loving description, a “weirdo”.’ Leo Robson: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘By the 1970s scientists were beginning to link lead emissions with surging delinquency and crime rates. The industry’s response was to deny everything.’ James Lasdun on the link between industrial waste and serial killers. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘At the same time that governments were legislating against racism in Britain, they were making it harder for people of colour to come and live here.’ Colin Douglas on sixty years of the Race Relations Act, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘Robert Wedderburn wrote of insurrection as the most efficient path to emancipation.’ Chris Townsend on the Black abolitionist and antislavery campaigner. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘For Battiste, it seems that fitting a white, faux-psychedelic mask over his Black experimentalism gave him a rare freedom.’ Francis Gooding on Dr John’s ‘Gris-Gris’, a ‘musico-magical palimpsest of New Orleans history’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Haunted house stories tend to end in one of two ways: either the family flees, or the ghosts are soothed, and everyone – living and dead alike – is allowed to move on.’ Jon Day on the cultural history of haunted houses. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The most interesting portions of Mamdani’s speech, to me, were the impressionistic lists, which conjured in more detail “every New Yorker, whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents, or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all”.’ Niela Orr on the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘The lyric poem, as Allen Grossman once put it, “is the genre of the ‘other mind’”. To showcase your large language model navigating that genre is to broach the kind of question more often consigned to sci-fi.’ Conrad Steel, new on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘To be held without charge and questioned under threat of criminal prosecution without a lawyer is otherwise unheard of in British law. At a port of entry or exit, this cornerstone of British justice no longer applies.’ Asim Qureshi on misuses of the Terrorism Act: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I swear to God this guy was ahead of me in the queue at Toad bakery today and he looked so head in the clouds but he took the last pain au chocolat

‘Words for songs need to be sung. Their sonic environments shape their emotional sense. The bent tones and boomerang echoes all over “Girl Violence” suggest the way that partners in an unhealthy relationship warp and misremember each other’s words.’ Stephanie Burt: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘Don’t reproduce and don’t eat meat were twin mantras for anyone who wanted to reduce their carbon footprint over a lifetime. That second piece of advice still holds. But the first was a misunderstanding.’ David Runciman on depopulation, online now from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Socioeconomic changes of recent decades have enabled the right to shape its own version of “the people”, providing a willing foundation for the kinds of authoritarianism that used to be imposed by force.’ Tony Wood on Latin America’s rightward drift: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Lanier’s songs moved many of his contemporaries. Herrick called him “rare Laniere” while John Donne said he “gave a life and harmony to all that he set”.’ Alice Spawls on the rediscovery of a portrait of one of the most intriguing figures of the 17th century. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘If, as Parr points out, you find yourself in one of his photographs and you don’t like it, there is nothing you can do. Some of his subjects might feel justifiably aggrieved about his interpretations of them.’ Rosemary Hill on Martin Parr’s people. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Britain needed to demonstrate that its diverse empire was free of racist legislation. The evidence produced by civil servants and colonial administrations to prove Britain’s non-racist credentials was thin.’ Colin Douglas on the genesis of the Race Relations Act. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

This is quite the read on @lrb.co.uk "Anyone who thinks the 21st century will not see the biggest global movement of peoples in history has not been paying attention"

‘By the early 2020s, Liverpool had 31 million visitors a year, and 35,000 people worked in tourism in the city, as many as worked on the docks in their heyday. The city’s past has been turned into a resource to be mined.’ Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘No measure has succeeded in turning a society in which the rate has fallen below replacement levels into one where it is above 2 again. That has never happened anywhere.’ David Runciman on depopulation, online early from our next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Crowds rarely feature in conventional accounts of the early medieval period. After the fall of Rome, population numbers collapsed, cities emptied out and, it’s often claimed, public gatherings largely ceased Is this true, a new book asks? www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘A tattoo can function in many ways: as a message for all to see or as a discreet code recognisable only to those who know its meaning. It can be an act of defiance as well as solidarity.’ Em Hogan reads Matt Lodder’s 𝘛𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘴: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘭𝘥 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘔𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘈𝘳𝘵. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Thomas More didn’t just love his family, he also educated them. Most strikingly, he educated his daughters to a remarkable level of competence. He was aware that “erudition in women is a new thing,” but in this he had no scruples about being innovative.’ Lucy Wooding: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘For philosophers devoted to the authority of Aristotle but nervous about the clash between his cosmology and the creationism of the Abrahamic faiths, it was reassuring to think that God’s existence could be established either way.’ Peter Adamson on Moses Maimonides. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Writing about the kind of figure who is usually given short shrift in literary fiction, he avoids the obvious showdowns, allowing illness and accident to deepen the characters’ attachments.’ Tim Parks on David Szalay’s novels. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... #ManBookerPrize2025

‘What makes “Audition” distinctive is a precision, a sharpness of focus, bare of corroborating detail. It’s hard to exaggerate how unusual this is in modern literature.’ Adam Mars-Jones on Katie Kitamura. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... #ManBookerPrize2025

‘Even before the age of the internet Sonia realises that any attempt to write “a slender story” on the subject is doomed. This is India, where nothing stays simple. Everything proliferates.’ Adam Mars-Jones reads Kiran Desai’s #BookerPrize2025-shortlisted novel. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Susan Choi captures so well, even as she pushes the novel to its limits (political documentation vying with fictional fluency), what it’s like to live between two worlds. None of the characters ever quite belongs.’ Blake Morrison reads ‘Flashlight’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... #BookerPrize2025

‘But, Amadou said, while younger generations might feel antipathy towards France’s continued neocolonial involvement in Niger, they were increasingly ignorant of the violent origins of that relationship.’ Rob Lemkin on what France owes to Niger. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘Whatever funding proposals are made, the BBC will still need to confront the post-truth world, either embracing it by going tribal or trying to make due impartiality look relevant.’ Owen Bennett-Jones on the state of the BBC, from 2018. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population growth has dramatically slowed and is about to go into reverse.’ Are we doomed? David Runciman on depopulation, online early from our next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘What keeps us in manipulative romances? It isn’t only the saviour complex, or the erotic rollercoaster, or even the false belief that “love is pain.” It’s also the feeling that we, too, need to be saved.’ Stephanie Burt (@notquitehydepark.bsky.social) on King Princess www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said – he didn’t know anything else. But there seemed little danger of that in my case.’ Leo Robson’s teenage film obsession: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘An executive decided the extra liability for running the Idaho plant filterless would be worth it: “200 children” at “$5 to 10,000 [per] kid” was a small price compared to the money to be made from uninterrupted smelting.’ James Lasdun on pollution and murder. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Mamdani is a politician, not an artist. Who knows what will happen from here on out, but his speech, with its denunciation of corruption and calls for inclusion, sounded something like a ballad of political integrity.’ Niela Orr on Mamdani’s victory, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘A modest rationalism was a natural response in the face of criticism aimed at the pretensions of Aristotelian science. Religious philosophers insisted on the limits of reason while demanding that it stay in its proper lane.’ @histphilosophy.bsky.social on Maimonides. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Scamming is no less grotesque an example of globalisation than the seafood slave industry operating out of Thailand or the cargo-ship dismantling business devastating the shores of Bangladesh.’ @alexclapp.bsky.social on cyber-slavery and the scam industry. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘It is on the border between the ordinary and the peculiar that Martin Parr likes to work. He points out, more than once, that what is commonplace now will one day be remarkable.’ Rosemary Hill reviews Parr’s memoir ‘Utterly Lazy and Inattentive’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The break with democratic rule opened space for far-right ideas to gain ground, not just the hysterical anti-communism of the Argentinian generals but also the authoritarian neoliberalism of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile.’ Tony Wood on the Latin American far right. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On reform of the BBC as an institution and a source of journalism, this 2018 piece by the excellent Owen Bennett-Jones still takes some beating: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘There is a disconcerting sense that something much more serious is going on, that all the hokum and stage magic might be misdirection of the sort that enables something secret to enter the room.’ Francis Gooding on Dr John’s ‘very strange record’ ‘Gris-Gris’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘There were serial killers before that; there have been serial killers since then. But this was unlike any other period in terms of the numbers involved.’ On the podcast, James Lasdun explores Caroline Fraser’s thesis linking industrial waste with serial killers. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

‘For every genuine relic-bearing cleric, there was a peddler of fake goods. What were authorities to do in cases where crowds seemed to legitimise miscreants?’ Pablo Scheffer on the early medieval crowd regime. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘At the same time that governments were legislating against racism in Britain, they were making it harder for people of colour to come and live here.’ Colin Douglas on sixty years of the Race Relations Act, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

‘In the 1520s, when More was writing, Lutheranism looked to him as frightening as any extremist political ideology might appear to us today.’ Lucy Wooding on the many faces of Thomas More. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘In 1991, the ice-preserved remains of a man who died around 3250 BCE surfaced in the Ötztal Alps. There were sixty tattoos – mostly dots and small crosses – on his lower spine, right knee and ankle joints, as though to alleviate pain.’ Em Hogan on tattooing: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...