Of the many scandals swirling around Donald Trump prior to his surprise election as president in 2016, perhaps the most telling — if tragically underplayed by the mainstream media — was the legal drama around Trump University. Trump sold the alleged “school” as a place for aspiring entrepreneurs to gain the necessary skills to make money in real estate. But the lawsuits that followed paint a different picture.”
Read the full interview here.
Raymond Carver had a hero and role model: Chekhov. After Carver died, many obituaries suggested Carver was “America’s Chekhov.” The accolade would have likely thrilled, if embarrassed, the humble Carver. He loved Chekhov, even inserted some of the Russian’s poems into his own book of poems, never claiming they were his own, merely happy to see Chekhov there beside him, in print. Carver said, “Chekhov is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.” “Anyone who reads literature,” said Carver, “anyone who believes, as one must, in the transcendent power of art, sooner or later has to read Chekhov.” Tess Gallagher wrote how “Ray had somehow won permission through a lifetime of admiration [of Chekhov] to take up his work with the audacity of love.”
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Even for Carl Cederström and André Spicer, professors at leading business schools, their resolution for 2016 was remarkably ambitious. They set out “to understand why people would be spending their lives trying to become better, faster, stronger” – that is, to understand why people make resolutions at all. The resulting book’s twelve chapters correspond to twelve months of self-optimization testing. Each has a set theme: productivity, the body, the brain, relationships, spirituality, sex, pleasure, creativity, money, morality, attention and meaning.”
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Trade wars and tariffs are in the news, thanks to President Trump’s populist protectionism. However, readers of ICN are probably already well aware of the moral arguments surrounding trade. The wealthy world’s trade policies have had a devastating effect on the developing world. This timely book explains how the US and EU subsidise their agriculture, and then dump their surplus production on poor countries. Through the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and sundry trade agreements, the rich world insists it has access to global markets, while ignoring its own track record of subsidising its industries and agriculture for decades.
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In his work on ‘post-democracy,’ political sociologist Colin Crouch provides a heuristic image
with which to understand an ideal democratic party. At the centre of this image is the party’s
leadership and its closest advisers, around which in concentric circles follow ‘parliamentary
representatives; then active members [including local government and paid staff]; next,
ordinary members [. . .], then supporters, or loyal voters [. . .]; finally, the largest circle of all,
the wider target audience, which the party seeks to persuade to vote for it.’
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The one-state solution is the idea of bringing justice and peace to Palestine/Israel by having all inhabitants of historic Palestine—the land that includes Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza—living in one, binational country, where everyone has equal rights and political matters are settled on the basis of one person, one vote. This arrangement differs from the two-state solution, which would partition historic Palestine into two states divided along ethno-religious lines, and contrasts with present conditions, in which Palestinians live as second-class citizens inside Israel, and under Israeli occupation in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza—the last of which is subject to a merciless siege.
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President Trump announced this afternoon that his June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is back on. The president spoke with senior North Korean leader Kim Yong Chol after the North Korean held talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Brian and John speak with Medea Benjamin, an anti-war activist who is the co-founder of Code Pink, and just returned from Korea, where she was meeting with other peace activists..
The interview with Medea starts 57 minutes into the show.
Listen to the full interview here.
I’m plugging away at two other books right now, and was going to save everything for an end-of-the-month newsletter, but I finished Jeanne Thornton’s novel The Dream of Doctor Bantam a few days ago and have been having a lot of FEELINGS. There’s a whole genre of book reviews that are really personal essays and can stand on their own as pieces of literature, but I don’t think I’m going to attempt something like that for this book.
Read the full review at Thursday.Ink.
Greg Shupak is the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media, which can be purchased on the website of OR Books. He has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. His fiction has appeared in a wide range of literary journals and he regularly writes analysis of politics and media for a variety of outlets including Electronic Intifada, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, In These Times, Jacobin, Literary Review of Canada, Middle East Eye, TeleSUR, This Magazine, and Warscapes…
Listen to the full interview here.
That Trump is a con man for the ages is the clear conclusion made in Trump U: The Inside Story of Trump University (OR Books). This insider’s exposé was written by Stephen Gilpen, a former employee of the now-defunct, unaccredited Trump University, who is described on the book’s back cover as “a self-taught expert at leveraging properties.” Before he hired on with the Trump Organization’s 2005-2010 foray into pedagogical profiteering, Gilpen had run a mortgage business and had made good money flipping real estate. He writes in Trump U that he thought it was possible to do good things for communities while buying and selling properties.
Read the full review here.
“The stories told about Palestine-Israel are as notable for what they exclude as they are for what they include.” This is an apt introduction to the three main narratives discussed in Greg Shupak’s book, “The Wrong Story. Palestine, Israel and the Media” (OR Books, 2018). It is imbued with meanings and not necessarily as straightforward as one would think upon first reading. Exclusion and inclusion, within the mainstream media context, are not juxtaposed against each other. On the contrary, both exclusion and inclusion operate within the parameters of projection; namely the attribution of violence to Palestinians by eliminating the historical and political framework.
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In the middle of the 2017 general election campaign, disaster and tragedy struck with the Manchester terror attack. In this extract from the second edition of The Candidate, Alex Nunns tells how the Corbyn campaign responded this time last year with a speech that was careful, but radical.
Read the full excerpt here.
RFL Host Richard French speaks with Stephen Gilpin, author of the new book “Trump U, The Inside Story.”
Watch the full interview here.
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however—not to mention the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal—it has also become a political one. Everything from the trustworthiness of social scientific indicators to the facticity of the news media to the techniques by which candidates reach voters is now subject to suspicion. The means by which we know “the public” is, today, a central public debate.
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Britain has seldom been so divided. There are chasms that exist between the left and the right, gender and age divides and increasingly notable wealth disparities. And if you want a microcosm of that, few places evidence it as potently as London.
London today is embattled as rarely before in peacetime. On one side the city has flourished, cementing its standing as a world leader in business and culture. On the other, poverty remains endemic, homelessness and the privations of low paid work are evident everywhere, gang violence is rampant, and the burnt-out hulk of the Grenfell Tower housing block stands as an ugly reminder that, even in the wealthiest areas, inequality can be so acute as to be murderous.
Read the full interview here.
Read the full extract here.
Trump angered Brits when he cited London’s increasing knife violence recently, saying a city hospital there was “like a war zone.” In this excerpt from Tales of Two Londons, the authors describe the joys and threats in a London neighborhood..
Read the full excerpt here.
