In a Devastated Country, One City Is Thriving
Marib, a regional city in war-ravaged Yemen, lies “poised between horror and hope.”
The Word Choices That Explain Why Jane Austen Endures
A piece that analyses Austen’s writing to try to understand her success in the “Darwinian struggle for literary immortality”.
Why We’re Post-Fact
A piece explaining how we came to find ourselves in an era where our political leaders are freed from fact, allowing us all to “indulge in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence”.
Trained to Kill: How Four Boy Soldiers Survived Boko Haram
A moving and troubling piece recounting the experience of four boys abducted by a religious militia in Nigeria and forced to join their army. http://www.bit.ly//nyt-boko
The Living Disappeared
An account of the babies born in torture centres during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and the search to find them, led by a group of grandmothers.
An Island Presence
An arresting excerpt from Howard Cunnell’s memoir Fathers & Sons, exploring what it is to grow up, to have a family, to be a parent, and through this to examine what he terms (in a phrase borrowed from a poem by another writer) “the shaping axe” of love. A fine piece of writing.
The Baby in the Plastic Bag
A man is walking by a graveyard in Oslo and hears a wail. It is a newborn baby, abandoned with only a plastic bag for protection, and close to death. This is the remarkable story of what happened next.
Dispatches from the Rap Wars
A sociologist spent 18 months living with gangs in Chicago fighting bitterly violent local turf wars, and simultaneously trying to make it big with rap tracks and on social media.
Where are we now?
The LRB dedicates a vast spread to responses to the UK’s EU referendum result. Contributors look at the issue from all sorts of angles – the greatest value perhaps lies in the interplay between the viewpoints when placed alongside each other.