Readers recommendMusicRR regular Magicman picks the playlist from last week's thread – songs on the subject of disappointmentAccording to psychotherapist & writer Ian Craib (The Importance of Disappointment), the notion of disappointment is integral to healthy growth and maturity of the mind.
Which may not come as much consolation to this week's A-listers. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix described three doomed hopefuls facing abrupt reality, dreamers rudely awoken. In his heartbreaking song, Castles Made of Sand, written in Essaouira, Morocco, the crumbling medieval castle on the beach provides a poetic image of atrophy. Read More...
ChinaObituaryRoderick MacFarquhar obituaryScholar with a crucial role in helping the west understand China’s opaque politicsRoderick MacFarquhar, who has died aged 88, was one of the most significant sinologists of the last 100 years, a figure who through a variety of academic posts and a series of books from the 1960s onwards opened up to the outside world the opaque machinations of elite politics in the People’s Republic of China.
The three volumes of his best-known book, Origins of the Cultural Revolution, published between 1974 and 1997, remain a monument of scholarship, a meticulous account of the years from the 50s onwards as Mao Zedong seemed to be growing increasingly marginalised in Beijing before his spectacular, and in many ways disastrous, comeback in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Read More...
BooksReviewWhite House aide who became the lead January 6 witness offers a persuasive, dispiriting tale of political degradation
Cassidy Hutchinson may have done more to place Donald Trump in legal jeopardy than anyone other than Trump himself. By the time the twentysomething deputy to Mark Meadows (Trump’s last chief of staff) completed her first public appearance before the January 6 committee, in June last year, the US had received an up-close-and-personal view of the venom, wrath and malice of the 45th president. Read More...