Over the weekend, William Wall brought this 2002 article by David Graeber, which has recently been republished on the site Autonomy Against Barbarism, to my attention. It reminded me of John Green’s review of Graeber’s “Possibilities” which we put up in 2008. The reason AAB are posting Graeber’s NLR article now is because of the [...]

Creature of habit that I am, this month means a getaway to somewhere hot and sunny. The heat is for my better half’s arthritis, the sun is for my ageing flesh. It also means an opportunity for some light reading that can’t be done on the train for fear of ostracism. I can still remember [...]

Each time I update my LibraryThing catalogue with my latest reads I feel guilty about not offering an opinion for the benefit of friends. It’s rare that anyone would actually want to read anything accumulating there unless prompted by the recommendations of others or as punishment for some ineffable crime. Even so, the odd book [...]

Book Review:The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.
It isn’t entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material [...]

Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, by John Gerassi, 2009, Yale.
Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making [...]

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, by Andy Beckett. Faber and Faber, 448 pp.
About a quarter of the way into Guardian journalist Andy Beckett’s impressive account of Britain in the 1970s, self-satisfied Labour Party politician Denis Healey, who served as Harold Wilson’s chancellor of the exchequer, observes that he knew “bugger [...]

In the July 4, 2009, edition of the BBC World Service’s discussion program The Forum, Nobel physics laureate Frank Wilczek, author of The Lightness of Being, gave listeners a succinct description of the nature of the universe:
Close to the core of quantum mechanics is that you learn that seeing is a very active process. There [...]

The River Liffey
A menagerie lion running through the middle of Dublin, the Liffey is an arbitrarily imposed U.N.-blue demarcation intended to promulgate false dichotomies among the urban proletariat to imbue them with a consciousness not just false but pantomimic in its theatricality. Have a good look at imperial practices in the construction of nation-states, the [...]

Trinity College: Made famous by the rowdiness and wanton irrational prejudices of its fellows in the 17th century, Trinity College has in more recent years declined into a sad, dilapidated caricature of its former self, like an Ian Paisley with Alzheimer’s. It is now famous for its illuminated manuscripts and for being the location of [...]

Following on from the unalloyed success of the 2006 convention, the member of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society unanimously agreed that no further meetings should take place until all temptation to build on that success had been extinguished in full. The call to hubris thus went unheeded for two entire years, even though demand was such [...]