I always thought WASPs were young women called Missy who dressed in little pink cardigans and pearls and preppie young men called Lowell or Carter, fashion items really. Well, this gigantic volume, conceived on a scale of grandeur to rival the US Capitol itself, has put me right. Rooted in Puritan New England, the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) emerged in the 1860s as a would-be moneyed ruling class pitted against the brutish, vulgar
There is a sketch in Chris Morris’s monstrously unsettling 2000 series Jam in which Morris plays a very posh man who has decided to live outside. The man stands wistful and weather-beaten, deriding the useless comforts of beds and central heating as he describes skinning dead blackbirds and fighting cats for food. Sometimes, he tells […]
In his magnum opus Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1921, the German sociologist Max Weber laid out a famous tripartite theory of stratification. Power in society, he noted, is mediated in three principal ways: through social class, through political parties and through something he called Stand. The word is one of those beguiling Teutonic […]
‘This is the book of the generations of Adam.’ So begins the fifth chapter of Genesis, and it lives up to the billing. Starting with Adam, who ‘begat a son in his own likeness, and in his own image, Seth’, the chapter describes the generations onwards – through Enos, Cainan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah and […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm