‘No former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public.” So began the announcement, nearly 200 years ago, of a brand-new newspaper to be published in Manchester, England, which proclaimed that “the spirited discussion of political questions” and “the accurate detail of facts” were “particularly important at this juncture”.
Now we are living through another extraordinary period in history: one defined by dazzling political shocks and the disruptive impact of new technologies in every part of our lives. The public sphere has changed more radically in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries – and news organisations, including this one, have worked hard to adjust.
But the turbulence of our time may demand that we do more than adapt. The circumstances in which we report, produce, distribute and obtain the news have changed so dramatically that this moment requires nothing less than a serious consideration of what we do and why we do it.
The figure of the witch is everywhere these days, showing up as the materialization of a feminist fantasy where women are able to reclaim and wield power over their own bodies. This resurgence of the witch’s tale feels inevitable given its history: Silvia Federici, both in her groundbreaking Caliban and the Witch and in her more recent books, has written at length about how witch-hunting developed in a world where communal relations were crumbling under the emergence of capitalism. From that moment on, the witch was the woman who escaped and defied patriarchal authority—and for this, she has always had to be punished.
Nearly every measurement of weight you’ve ever made, from peeking at your bathroom scale to measuring out flour for a recipe, can be traced back to just a single object: a metal kilogram made of platinum and iridium that resides under lock and key in an underground vault in Paris. It’s called the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, and since its creation in 1889 it has been the standard by which the world’s weights are defined. But not for much longer.
Copies of the IPK are distributed around the world, with countries then creating their own reference weights, as close to the original as possible. These, in turn, are used to calibrate scales and weights throughout every section of society, from labs and factories to supermarkets and bakeries. And, yes, this includes America. The United States uses pounds and ounces instead of kilograms, but these too are calibrated using the International Prototype Kilogram, just like the metric system.
But later this week, on Friday, November 16th, a coup is planned in this international ministry of weights. After having served for 129 years as the world’s standard, the International Prototype Kilogram (or Le Grand K, as it’s known locally) will be stood down. Grandees of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which regulates the metric system, will gather in Versailles and vote to replace this physical artifact with a definition of the kilogram based on a fundamental constant of nature.
Susie McKinnon doesn’t remember being a child or remember being any age other than she is now: in her 60s. She can’t remember special events, either. She knows she went to her nephew’s wedding. She knows her husband went with her. But she can’t actually remember being there.
In fact, she has very few memories from her life – but she doesn’t have amnesia.
Some may find Roberts’s emphasis on politics and war old-fashioned, indistinguishable, say, from the approach taken almost half a century ago by Henry Pelling. He is out of step with much of the best British history being written today, where the likes of Dominic Sandbrook, Or Rosenboim and John Bew have successfully blended cultural and intellectual history with the study of high politics. But it would be foolish to say Roberts made the wrong choice. He is Thucydidean in viewing decisions about war and politics, politics and war as the crux of the matter. A life defined by politics here rightly gets a political life. All told, it must surely be the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written.
The human details in Trethewey’s work — those crabs, that music, those cracked palms — are like the small feathers that give contour to a bird’s wing. “Monument” is a major book, and in her best poems this poet soars.