Happy eightieth birthday to Jean-Pierre Léaud, from whom I learned writing in cafés and talking.

Blown away by The Pulitzer Prizes judge Ed Yong's account of choosing this year's finalists. Ed described crying after finishing A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and crying again after learning it had won.

Can hardly believe colleagues this generous exist.
buttondown.email/edyong209/arch…

I was not anticipating this in the heart of Potsdam, Germany. I really wasn’t.

Bill Walton, arrested in 1972 while protesting the Vietnam War.

RIP.

Source: tessa2.lapl.org/digital/collec…

(a) I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now
(b) I was very young and I thought that we were winning

Advantage: Tie!

Probably influenced by his friend Adorno, who was the first from the Frankfurt School to start taking selfies, Ernst Bloch also took a few of them, but using the analog method. Here is one of them:

great Mark von Hagen, one of few colleagues whose pre-2014 work helps to understand what’s going on now. We were at EUI in Florence. Mark died in 2019

Aryeh Neier speaking truth in an age of untruth. Exceptional.

On October 26, 2019, Jose Canseco opened up his own car wash in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he signs autographs every Wednesday

Today Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra turns 100 years. Jimmy Carter needs only three months to reach the same milestone. Two great Americans.

Archie Shepp and some Mothers

Thanks Abier. And for Daniel’s most recent essay, please turn here: theideasletter.substack.com/p/seeing-gaza-…

East Harlem, New York, 1952

Havana, Cuba - Steve Cerf

Pasolini on consumer society and power

This is a piece about China, but the implications and lessons for Africa are numerous and profound, and I will write about them more subsequently. foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/22/chi…

Delighted to see my essay on Germany and Israel (published online in March) in the new print edition of Dissent Magazine, along with lots of other great pieces including David Broder on Meloni’s Europe.

There are good reasons to help Ukraine without resorting to absurd and facile historical analogies.

Amazing new issue of theideasletter.substack.com with a brilliant essay by Sidecar's Oliver Eagleton on degrowth (and its critics) and a smashing interview with everyone's favorite macro-economist Branko Milanovic together with the estimable Carlos Sardiña Galache It's free to subscribe too!