Weekend Reading List
The absence of Hillary Clinton, Stuart Hall’s imaginative Left, and the shadow of population control: what to read this weekend
The absence of Hillary Clinton, Stuart Hall’s imaginative Left, and the shadow of population control: what to read this weekend
- To see how difference 'operates inside people’s heads, you have to go to art, you have to go to culture’, Stuart Hall said in 2007. Jessica Loudis writes in the New Republic on why we need Hall’s imaginative Left.
- Politics, judgments, or restrictions – the things involved in a public discourse about sex – ‘have always been excluded from Playboy. They are too complicated’. Time to revisit this Molly Young piece in n+1 from 2009, on the story of Hugh Hefner, who died this week.
- What happens to drag culture in an era in which irony maintains very little revolutionary value?
- Make Kin, Not Borders! Simon Torracinta reviews Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017) for The New Inquiry: 'Scarcity poses a genuine challenge for the collective reproduction of the planet, and human density contributes to it. But neo-Malthusianism is no answer at all.'
- Over at frieze, Houman Barekat writes on a new exhibition which pays tribute to W.G. Sebald’s literature of memory and loss, two decades after the German author’s lectures which looked back at the Allied fire-bombing of German cities during the Second World War, and the reluctance of postwar German society to speak openly about it. With the rise of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, winning its first parliamentary seats, it’s more important than ever to return to Sebald and the other German writers of his generation who helped their country ‘to truly confront the suffering and trauma that resulted the last time Europe gave free rein to its basest impulses’.
- 'Clinton was a wonk and Trump was a clown, but in the end the smartest people in D.C. couldn’t find an insult that would actually hurt the stupidest man in American political history.’ In case you missed it – Sam Kriss on Hillary Clinton’s 'malignantly useless' What Happened.
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