Tag: rss_source

“All of which I think explains why mid-sized regional cities sometimes now feel so much more vibrant than the ostensibly richer capital. A couple of decades back central London did have its share of decent nightlife. But the truly interesting things got pushed ever outwards, from Farringdon to Shoreditch to Dalston to Hackney Wick, as the developers regenerated one area after another. The further out it went, though, the smaller the catchment area – and the less chance of anything really sparking”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/undocumented-side-effects

“Then, in 2022, attorney general Suella Braverman rewrote the legal guidance. It was like someone had injected crystal meth into a clown’s eyeballs, slapped them repeatedly around the face, thrown them into a children’s ball pit and then demanded they write a detailed legal proposition”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/a-good-man-in-government

“I am in my mid-40s, almost exactly halfway between my graduation and my retirement date (LOL, right). I have known precisely three years of sustained growth. I was a late starter, but to have known proper growth at all of the sort we took for granted for decades – centuries! – you’d need to have your 40th birthday in sight. Any younger than that, and you were probably still in education. That is twenty years of adults who’ve never known a “normal” economy”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/exit-pursued-by-a-bear-market

“Typically the left’s answers to this are “protests” and “political advocacy” and “persuasion in all of its forms.” These are all great and valid techniques. But a quick glance at the state of the world tells us that they are insufficient for balancing out the power on the other side of the equation from us, which consists of all the billionaires and all the corporations and all the guns. Is there a form of direct power that we can wield, that will be effective in this radically skewed battle? Yes. It is organized labor power. That is it, my friends. That is the left’s power vector. That is where our focus needs to be”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/theres-no-justice-without-power

“He may well have been from the land we call Wales – but he wasn’t Welsh because Welshness hadn’t been invented yet. The man we know as Patrick was Romano-British, a mix of class status and ethnic group that no longer exists, and which messes with the internet’s sense of how colonialism works by merging both culture and probably genes of coloniser and subject. Trying to map this onto anything that exists today is madness”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-identity

“People had that look on their face, like an animal that has just come out of hibernation. They were sitting on walls, closing their eyes and facing up – that very specific Spring awareness of warmth, before you’ve started to take it for granted. Everyone looked beautiful: radiant, happy, alive. We’d survived another winter. We made it through”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/reasons-to-be-cheerful

“You need to control institutions in order to win at politics, so almost by definition you need institutionalists. You need people who are comfortable making compromises and doing boring stuff. But you also need to energize and mobilize people, and the institutionalists tend to be bad at that because they’re busy making compromises and doing boring stuff. So for that you need activists.

Ideally, you want these two tendencies to co-exist. There will be tension between them, but they ought to operate within certain limits. Instead, what we’re seeing right now is essentially a battle of institutionalists versus activists. But that is ultimately self-defeating – because, to repeat, you need both to win. What the Democrats really need are leaders who can synthesize both necessities and build a solid movement. And for that, they need better leaders.

https://amerex.substack.com/p/democrats-need-some-better-leaders

“The First World War dominates the culture of the time. It echoes down to us in poetry, literature and film. The flu pandemic which followed infected a third of the global population and killed anywhere up to 100 million people and yet you never really see anything about it. It never comes up. Apart from one informational film, which survives in the BFI National Archive, the 1918/19 pandemic doesn’t appear in British film at all”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-to-read-this

“The protest checked every “what we should be doing now” box—bringing community members into the streets, speaking out, remaining unswayed in our beliefs, taking action—but it was all playing out in an America where the mood to push the the kid in the wheelchair into the mud and laugh has taken hold. The mean spirit of nihilistic vengeance is momentarily unleashed. We will stuff it back in its box, sooner or later. But not yet”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/a-television-show-called-the-usa

“Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-3-2025