by dap | May 5, 2024 | The Guardian
The protests sweeping US universities have brought intense division, but some students have treasured hope, unity, solidarity and love
Seven months ago, before Hamas stormed into Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostage, Eleanora Ginsborg and Samar Omer had never met.
But in the attack’s violent aftermath, Ginsborg and Omer, students at the University of California, San Diego, forged a new friendship – and a new sense of activism-fueled purpose. A third student who already knew Omer “like a sister”, and requested to go by the pseudonym Hala Abdallah out of safety concerns, completed the group.
by dap | May 5, 2024 | The Guardian
Emerging from Covid’s shadow, the city is resonating with glamour, politics and power – and the traffic jams are building up too
Call it a return to IRL (In Real Life). New Yorkers are experiencing a bracing resumption of the physical experience of living in the city, four years after the onset of the pandemic upended routines, pushed people online and left much of the population, as in so many places, wondering if normality would ever return.
Uptown, police have broken up
condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza. Downtown, a furious Donald Trump is commandeering attention from
, snarling up traffic as his motorcade travels to and fro. President Biden’s fundraising trips to the city to fund his re-election are having a similar effect.
by dap | May 5, 2024 | The Guardian
Last week, Conservative campaigning gave a chilling indication of the depths to which they will sink to retain power
In the psychedelic 60s stop-frame animation children’s television series Trumpton, all the characters have identifying proper names – the fireman Captain Flack, the state stormtrooper Police Constable Potter, and the mysterious dungeon-dwelling economist Gideon Pencils Osborne. The mayor of Trumpton, however, was known only as The Mayor, and neither his actual name nor his political affiliations were ever revealed, though he smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many rightwing meetings.
All over the land last week, Tory mayors dreamed of similar anonymity, hoping that if no one knew anything about them, and their campaign literature didn’t reveal they belonged to the Tory party, people might at least vote for them by accident, thinking they were someone else. “Oh! Andy Street was the West Midlands’ Tory mayor candidate? I thought I was voting for the glamorous, and now deceased, Welsh wrestler Adrian Street. I liked it when he pulled out Jimmy Savile’s hair in 1971.”
by dap | May 5, 2024 | The Guardian
The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging as memories fade
I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.
I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of
and
. His newest book,
, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at
by dap | May 5, 2024 | The Guardian
Raised as we now are on social media and true crime, we need to fight the impulse to always find out more
If you haven’t yet watched
, a story that begins with its star
experience with a stalker, you probably have a good reason. It will not be because, for instance, nobody has recommended it, told you how extraordinary it is, or powerful, or unique, and it won’t be because you haven’t heard of it – its success has been startling (as I type it’s at the top of Netflix’s UK and US charts weeks after its release) and its themes have made headlines. It could be, as is the case with a friend of mine, that its subject matter hits too close to home, and however unsettling it is for me to watch, for them the prospect feels like it might pull a thread and unravel everything, not least the damage caused by police failures, but we’ll come to that.
Despite Gadd’s nuanced portrayal of the woman who stalked him, and his beautifully strange story of love and trauma, some fans of the show quickly created a horrible sort of sequel when they attempted to expose the stalker on social media. Historic tweets were urgently screengrabbed, photographs posted side by side, she was quote-tweeted as if a celebrity – the character’s name was trending for days. On
, Gadd urged them to stop. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”
