Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, were forced to cut short a launch event for his book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of loud booing from the audience.
The audience was angry that Trump Jr and Guilfoyle would not take questions.
Trump Jr tried to argue that taking questions risked creating soundbites that leftwing social media posters would distort
Continue reading...Interviewed about her plans for retirement, the former Aotearoa New Zealand prime minister says the word is not in her vocabulary
Helen Clark, 69, is the second woman to hold the post of prime minister of Aotearoa New Zealand and fifth-longest serving prime minister. She was also the first female head of the United Nations Development Program.
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Continue reading...A search for the mysterious author of a counterculture classic led to someone else entirely. Or did it? By Emmanuel Carrère
Toward the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart worked as a psychoanalyst in New York and was bored stiff. He lived in a pretty apartment with a nice view. He practised yoga, read books on Zen, dreamed vaguely of joining a commune but did not dare. As a therapist, he was resolutely nondirective. If a patient who still had not lost his virginity was plagued by sadistic impulses and said on Rhinehart’s couch that he would like to rape and kill a little girl, his professional ethics obliged him to repeat with a calm voice: “You’d like to rape and kill a little girl?” No judgment. But what he wanted to say was: “Well, go ahead, then! If what really turns you on is raping and killing a little girl, then stop boring me with this fantasy. Do it!”
He checked himself before coming out with such monstrosities, but they obsessed him more and more. His own fantasies were nothing extreme – not enough to get him sent to prison – but like everyone else, he stopped himself going through with them. What Luke would have liked, for example, was to sleep with Arlene, the wife of his colleague Jake Ecstein, who lived across the landing. But as a faithful husband, he let the idea simmer away in the back of his mind.
Continue reading...My friend Nigel Cross, who has died aged 66, coolly straddled the worlds of literature and international development.
Born in Cambridge to Barry Cross, a university academic who became president of Corpus Christi College, and his wife, Audrey (nee Crow), Nigel was educated at Clifton college, Bristol, and Sussex University, where he studied English.
Continue reading...Around the world, mobile library programmes are taking books, educational support and even counselling to communities in serious and urgent need
Every week, two converted blue buses stocked with children’s books carefully navigate the streets of Kabul, avoiding areas where deadly explosions are common. These travelling libraries stop off at schools in different parts of the city, delivering a wealth of reading material directly to youngsters who have limited access to books.
“A lot of schools in our city don’t have access to something as basic as a library,” says Freshta Karim, a 27-year-old Oxford University graduate who was inspired to start Charmaghz, a non-profit, in her home city having grown up without many books herself. “We were trying to understand what we could do to promote critical thinking in our country.”
Continue reading...The son’s book is one-eyed, loose with the facts and a crude attack on the left. In short, it’s like his dad – and it might work
In Triggered, the president’s eldest child excoriates the left for its censoriousness, but ignores his father’s repeated demands for the same. In case Don Jr forgot, Trump père is no friend of free speech or a free press.
Related: Donald Trump Jr's Triggered: a litany of trolling and insults worthy of his father
Continue reading...For years I binged on diet books: paleo, keto, vegan, the 16:8. But can you have too much of a good thing?
It started during the 1999 eclipse. The year before, I had run away to Devon. Lots of bad things had happened there, but the main one was that I’d got fat. On my 27th birthday, I was 5ft 6in and weighed a hefty (as I bizarrely thought then) 9st 2lb. Worse: according to every news story I read, I was going to get an incurable disease and die. The most likely cause would be food; mad cow disease hadn’t gone away, and then there were pesticides and insecticides and growth hormones. When a friend told me he’d heard organic diets were cancer-preventing, I was in. As the skies darkened on 11 August, and birds began their evening song hours too early, I pledged that if I survived the solar eclipse, I would eat only organic food. I would stay healthy, and I would not die.
When organic food didn’t make my life perfect, I tried food combining (no protein with carbs). Then veganism. For 20 years now, I have cycled between diets and diet books, in search of the perfect hack for a good life: great health, better skin, the optimum weight and all, of course, with minimal impact on the environment. (Like so many women who dedicate their eating disorders to saving the planet, I need what I eat to be in some way an ethical choice.) I have been a vegetarian, a meat eater; I have gone paleo, keto, macrobiotic, pegan (look it up).
Continue reading...Author highlights evidence suggesting that ‘orphanage tourism’ drives families apart and makes children vulnerable to abuse
JK Rowling has called on students around the world not to volunteer at orphanages, pointing to emerging evidence that “orphanage tourism” drives family separation and child trafficking.
Speaking at the One Young World summit in London, the global forum for young leaders, the Harry Potter author and founder and president of children’s charity Lumos, said orphanages do “irreparable harm” and “perpetuate the abuse” of children and communities.
Continue reading...They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?
Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.
Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?
Continue reading...The judges staged a ‘joyful mutiny’ to name the pair joint winners of the literary prize. And that’s not all that unites them
It was clear that things were not going to plan when, just half an hour before the guests began to arrive, the judges of this year’s Booker prize had yet to make a decision. Five hours after they had begun their deliberations, they finally emerged in a state of “joyful mutiny” to announce that they had decided to break with convention, throw out the rule book and anoint two winners rather than the usual one.
By happy coincidence, Bernardine Evaristo is the same age that Margaret Atwood was when, in 2000, she first won the Booker prize with The Blind Assassin. “And I’m happy that we’ve both got curly hair,” quipped Atwood as they took to the stage arm in arm. They talk about it again the following morning, comparing notes about hair etiquette and handy products for curls. “People used to review my hair back in the day,” says Atwood.
Continue reading...Decision to make first black female winner, Bernardine Evaristo, share £50,000 prize with Margaret Atwood causes controversy
The Booker prize judges’ decision to break the rules and jointly award the prize to Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo has been criticised, with detractors pointing out that the first black woman ever to win Britain’s most prestigious literary award has had to share it – while receiving half the usual money.
Chair of the judges Peter Florence shocked the literary world on Monday night when he revealed that the jury had decided – unanimously, he said – to flout rules, which have been in place since 1992, that the Booker “may not be divided or withheld”. After more than five hours of deliberation, he announced that this year’s £50,000 award would be split between Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, and Evaristo’s polyphonic novel Girl, Woman, Other. Told in the voices of 12 different characters, mostly black women, Evaristo has said that the novel, her eighth, stems from the fact that “we black British women know that if we don’t write ourselves into literature, no one else will”.
Continue reading...Farrow’s book Catch and Kill describes Harvey Weinstein’s efforts to silence alleged victims and put Farrow himself off the story
The combination of rage, threats, professional promises and vulnerability that Harvey Weinstein used to secure the silence of women he allegedly sexually attacked is described in a newly disclosed interview between one of his accusers and Ronan Farrow, the journalist who exposed the Hollywood mogul.
In his new book Catch and Kill chronicling his investigation into Weinstein, Farrow relates for the first time details of his conversation with a longtime former employee of the movie producer, Alexandra Canosa.
Continue reading...One online distributor has withdrawn the #MeToo memoir, but other stores have stocked it, and the publisher insists it will not be withdrawn
Ronan Farrow’s book on the #MeToo movement has been withdrawn from sale in Australia by one online bookseller but was available in bookstores on Tuesday despite a legal threat from an Australian journalist who Farrow has previously alleged helped to protect the disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein from negative publicity.
The book, Catch and Kill, was released in Australia on Tuesday and was on sale in some shops, including Readings and WH Smith in Melbourne. But customers who ordered it from the online seller Booktopia were told it had been “withdrawn from sale” and had their payment refunded.
Continue reading...My friend and colleague Caroline Williams, who has died aged 57 after a short illness, was a senior lecturer in Latin American history at the University of Bristol. A much-loved and respected teacher, research supervisor and colleague, she was also an award-winning scholar.
Caroline was born in Argentina, the third of the four children of Erik Hansen, a metallurgist from Cardiff, and his wife, Tricia (nee Gorman), a nurse. She was 14 when the military junta seized power in 1976. This provoked in her a profound and critical interest in both national and global politics and a lifelong concern for human rights.
Continue reading...Svetlana Alexievich gave a lecture last week commemorating the work of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Alexievich’s book Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories was published in June in the UK, more than three decades after it first appeared in the USSR to critical acclaim. It is based on interviews with a Soviet generation that experienced the second world war as children and has lived ever since with trauma. In 2015 Alexievich, now 71, won the Nobel prize for literature. The committee praised “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. She lives in Minsk, Belarus, and is currently writing books about love and death.
Why are you in the UK?
I came because of Anna [Politkovskaya]. I loved and respected her so much. We met in 2005 at a prize ceremony in Oslo. There were many people there but Anna was somehow on her own, separate from the others. She was a person of extreme integrity bordering on fanaticism. We had a coffee, talked. There was one theme that united us: war. She was traumatised, at that point very close to a nervous breakdown, and full of pain and frustration. Anna was unhappy that she couldn’t explain the situation [in Chechnya]. She wasn’t able to make the west understand. She told me about the threats she was receiving. Her assassination [in 2006] came as a complete shock. I knew from our conversations that she was more or less prepared for this to happen. As a writer, I imagine what she was going through when she entered the lift of her apartment and the killer was there. It’s hard to imagine.
At 87, le Carré is publishing his 25th novel. He talks to John Banville about our ‘dismal statesmanship’ and what he learned from his time as a spy
I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.
Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life.
Continue reading...New 6in Kindle Kids Edition comes with 1,000 books, word-building tools and parental controls
Amazon has launched a new version of its popular Kindle e-reader aimed at children, which comes bundled with more than 1,000 age-appropriate books.
The new £99 Kindle Kids Edition is a special variant of Amazon’s latest, cheapest frontlit 6in Kindle with software designed to encourage reading through gamification and word building.
Continue reading...A woman who has been cheated on has a complex social role to play – she must be devastated, dignified and instantly unforgiving (banishing the sexual miscreant), as though she’s been given Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive to act out in some ghastly, very public round of emotional charades. No one knows this more than Hillary Clinton, who, in some eyes, committed a heinous feminist faux pas by forgiving her husband, Bill, for his multiple infidelities.
Instead of the “Go on now, go – walk out the door!” narrative that is practically the cheatee-national anthem, Hillary “stood by her man”, even as she denied becoming a Tammy Wynette caricature. She has been relentlessly questioned, mocked and distrusted on account of this decision, arguably suffering more for her husband’s betrayals than he ever did. Now, interviewed with her daughter, Chelsea, about their new The Book of Gutsy Women, she cited “the decision to stay in my marriage” as the gutsiest personal thing she ever did. Just the gutsiest, Hillary – or also the smartest, the only outcome that made any kind of sense?
Continue reading...The harrowing experiences that Fred Sai faced as a young medical officer in Ghana in the 1960s fuelled his concern about the link between frequent childbearing and preventable death and sickness in mothers and children, and turned him into a passionate campaigner for reproductive rights and health in the developing world.
In his early clinical work, Sai, who has died aged 95, came across many children with protein-energy malnutrition, or kwashiorkor, which in the language of the Ga ethnic group to which he belonged means “the disease of the displaced child”. “I realised that fully a third of my child patients had mothers who were pregnant or had a young sibling born very soon after them,” he told the Lancet in 2012. “The abrupt stopping of breastfeeding was making them sick. I thought that one way to help these women was to teach them family planning and the importance of spacing children properly.”
Continue reading...Crucible, Sheffield
Tobi Bamtefa gives a swaggering, thundering performance as the dictator Idi Amin, but this adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel is stodgy and plodding
Swaggering and lumbering, fickle and childish, Tobi Bamtefa thunders between laughter and malice as the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in this adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel, directed by Gbolahan Obisesan. The president’s greed and gruesome misogyny glisten like beads of sweat under the weight of his charm and bravado. But even this confident lead performance can’t rescue a stodgy, overwritten script and humdrum production in which tensions fizzle, plot holes reign and actions lack consequence.
Daniel Portman plays Nicholas Garrigan, a fresh-faced Scottish doctor thrown into the position of Amin’s personal physician. A chirpy, stuttering romantic, he chooses to see the new president as a beacon of hope for the country. But Garrigan’s intentions are never clear. With Amin’s charm so immediately overshadowed by his brutality in Steve Waters’ altered timeline, we don’t understand why the wilfully ignorant and quickly complicit doctor is so enamoured with the president; he has to turn a blind eye so fast he’s left spinning on the spot for the rest of the show. With his ethics bludgeoned too soon, his cowardice is amplified and our sympathy for him is significantly reduced.
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