Congratulations to Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Acedemy annoucned today that Ms. Ernaux was chosen not to send a message to the world, but for the quality of her writing. “Annie Ernaux is surely the only winner of the Nobel prize in literature to have written nostalgically—even ecstatically—about the London suburb of North Finchley. Her book of 2016, ‘A Girl’s Story,’ is typical of the French writer’s approach. As the author recounts formative late-teenage experiences in Normandy and as an au pair in London, she blends deeply personal memoir with social and historical insight. Decades later, she returns to the city for a literary event; while her fellow delegates consume culture, she takes the Tube and plunges ‘back into my past life.’ As she writes, ‘the only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure.’ Ms Ernaux’s forensic but lyrical French prose has been seizing life and time, and mining literary pleasure from even the most harrowing memories, for almost half a century. On October 6th the Swedish Academy chose her as its Nobel laureate for 2022 ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’. She is a prose poet of everyday hopes and fears; she probes how change and conflict affect the most ‘ordinary’ of folk, especially women of supposedly low status. Many of her books channel the life she has led not around Left Bank cafés and salons, but in Cergy-Pontoise, a new and unglamorous suburban town north-west of Paris.” (TheEconomist)
The New York Times podcast The Daily is something I rarely miss. It is smart, informative, internationalist and interesting — the best of the Times and the best of the podcast format. Today they ran a heartbreaking story on the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, only to be marred by the fact that during the podcast they ran ads by fossil fuels! WTF! And it is not the first time, according to NASA scientist Peter Kalmus, who tweeted, angrily: “Once again today, @nytimes's The Daily ran ads for fossil gas during an episode on the catastrophic flooding of Pakistan. It's jarring, and horrible, to ADVERTISE FOR FOSSIL FUELS during a piece about climate breakdown. @mikiebarb this reflects very poorly on you and The Daily.”
Is the money that the Times gets worth the jarring hypocrisy of doing a story on the effects that fossil fuels have on the planet?
One takeaway from the story — which was otherwise excellent — is that Pakistan’s situation is many times worse than the floods in 2010 because many of the NGOs that operated then have either been dismantled or left the country altogether. Apparently as a result of the CIA’s using a fake vaccination NGO as deep cover to kill Osama bin-Laden, Pakistan, humiliated by the operation, cracked down on the organizations operating within their border. Those idiotic and “macho” crackdowns resulted in NGOs leaving the country en masse. And it was those NGOs that are at the present desperately needed to get aid to the millions of displaced Pakistanis. Great going Imran Khan!
“A Rwandan court has acquitted three journalists who had been detained for four years on charges of spreading false information with the intention of inciting violence and tarnishing the country’s image. ‘There is no evidence to prove that their publication incited violence,’ Speciose Nyirabagande, one of the court’s three judges, said on Wednesday. Rights groups say Rwanda has one of the worst human rights records in sub-Saharan Africa and accuse the government of using authoritarian means to stifle dissent. The government rejects the accusations, saying it guarantees freedom of speech. Jean Damascène Mutuyimana, Niyodusenga Schadrack and Jean Baptiste Nshimiyimana, reporters with the YouTube channel Iwacu TV, were arrested in October 2018 on allegations of causing unrest and spreading rumours.” (Al Jazeera)
“Olivia Nuzzi: Speaking of, you report that when Marla Maples was giving birth to Tiffany, Trump invited a tabloid reporter and a photographer into the delivery room, and when Maples asked them to leave, Trump wrapped a blanket up to look like a newborn baby might be inside of it and posed for a photo. The story was published but the photo was not. Maggie, I screamed. Maggie Haberman: The fake baby is new. Nuzzi: Did you see the photo of the fake baby? Haberman: I think it might have gotten deleted from the Daily News archives. Isn’t that a shame? Nuzzi: The fake baby is really … Haberman: It was something. I thought that was a pretty stunning anecdote.” (Olivia Nuzzi and Maggie Haberman/MYMag)
“For this article, we reviewed about 335 Senate, House, and gubernatorial ads released in the second half of September. We primarily used the compilation of ads that appears at the end of Daily Kos Elections’s Morning Digest newsletter -- the liberal site includes a list of ads from both sides in every issue. There were slightly more ads from Republican sources than Democratic ones, although the totals were fairly even -- about 175 were from Republican candidates or outside groups, while about 160 were from Democratic candidates or their allies. Nearly every ad was 30 seconds long, the standard length of a television ad … We have 5 takeaways from our campaign ad binge: 1. Abortion dominates Democratic advertising … 2. Checks and balances … A prominent feature of Republican messaging is simply arguing that Democrats are much too in lockstep with their unpopular national leaders. The most common formulation we noticed was Republicans using President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as a way of tying Democrats to their national party brand …” (Sabato’s Crystal Ball)
“When it comes to putting a number on this year’s crypto swoon, the one cited most often is $2 trillion, the amount of digital-asset market value that evaporated in the downdraft. But here’s a figure that captures the breadth of the bear market: 12,100. That’s the number of crypto tokens that have effectively ceased trading this year, according to data provider Nomics — not dead technically, but like zombies, not quite alive either. Most blockchain projects are built around bespoke digital coins, which often function as user rewards and compensate developers for their work, giving them incentive to stay involved. During last year’s price run-up, thousands of crypto startups issued new tokens to support these projects, and bullish sentiment meant there was ample demand for the market to absorb the vast majority of them and still drive prices higher. That all changed this year, as macroeconomic conditions put investors off risk assets and token prices nosedived. The implosion of the Terra blockchain, as well as the collapse of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and crypto firms like Celsius Network caused a further selloff and cooled venture capital funding. The biggest tokens, like Bitcoin and Ether, suffered major declines before eventually finding support. But for many coins backing fledgling, riskier and sometimes sketchier endeavors, the downturn has delivered the equivalent of a knockout blow. Nomics compiled an analysis of coin activity for Bloomberg and discovered that more than 12,100 tokens have become ‘zombies’ this year, defined as tokens that have not traded for a month.” (Bloomberg)
“Elizabeth’s disgraced second son—gets his own streaming close-up in Banished: Prince Andrew, a Peacock documentary debuting today. The film is not a bombshell exposé but a fascinating origin story about this generation’s most disgraced member of the British royal family. Royal author and editorial icon Tina Brown offers her trademark fizzy analysis about the queen’s coddled son and his downward trajectory. Longtime Buckingham Palace press spokesman Dickie Arbiter recounts his firsthand experiences with the royal and minces no words: ‘I suppose there’s always one runt of the litter. And Andrew’s it,’ says Arbiter, before calling the prince an ‘idiot’ for agreeing to the disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview. Former Buckingham Palace protection officer Paul Page remembers Maxwell’s frequent palace visits, the revolving door of women Andrew entertained, and even the prince’s extensive teddy bear collection, which Andrew reportedly insisted be put in correct order by maids each day. (Page says there was even a laminated diagram of that correct order in the prince’s bedside table so staff did not screw anything up.) Simon Wilson, Britain's former deputy head of mission to Bahrain, describes an almost comically humiliating trip Andrew made to the country in the early aughts. In a phone call with V.F., Banished director Jamie Crawford explained that he began working on the project in March, shortly after the royal had been stripped of his military titles and settled with accuser Virginia Giuffre for a rumored $16 million, even though he has always insisted he never met Giuffre and has denied all the allegations. Crawford says he sought to work with ‘people who had worked and lived alongside the royals through the decades’ and also “speak to the journalists who’ve not been dabbling in royal coverage recently but have had a whole lifetime of it from the ’80s onward. So these people have had a front-row view of everything that's happened since the ’70s and ’80s. They were an absolute fount of fascinating information.’ The film supplements these interviews with rarely seen archival footage that traces the royal’s life, from his birth in 1960 to the mutually beneficial relationship with Epstein and Maxwell that would be his undoing. (Epstein had the money, Maxwell had the social connections, and Andrew had the status.)” (VF)