Berfrois

October 2017

‘Pain relief usually ends up at opioid analgesics’

‘Pain relief usually ends up at opioid analgesics’

The notion that your doctor knows best, and will make decisions about your treatment with little attention to your desires, has been out of fashion for decades.

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Uber, Deleted

Uber, Deleted

For about three months this year, I drove an Uber taxi in London (as research for a book about the company). My entry into this world of casual employment was greeted by reams of pseudo-emancipatory rhetoric.

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‘We were subversives, a little suspect, a little uncomfortable’

‘We were subversives, a little suspect, a little uncomfortable’

I am not the only woman who worked at Playboy and kept her clothes on. When I was hired as literary editor in 2005...

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Homage to Democracy

Homage to Democracy

Carles Puigdemont, President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, in 2016. Photograph by Generalitat de Catalunya. From EUROPP: The secessionist parties’ reaction has been to use their small majority in the Catalan parliament to pass a law that makes the constitution null and void. This is not an exaggeration; it is there...

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Corruption, It’s Bad

Corruption, It’s Bad

Having set off for Moscow after a dinner with friends, the hero awakens outside of Kolpino from an intolerable rocking. Seeing in front of him the windshield bespattered with vomit.

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‘We have not yet abandoned the citadels that the modernists established’

‘We have not yet abandoned the citadels that the modernists established’

In the tumultuous period that began in the late 1910s and ended in the late 1940s, poet-critics began to consolidate their cultural gains by making a durable place for literary modernism in the American social order.

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Residents of Reality

Residents of Reality

‘Postmodernity’ has a history. It came not from nowhere, but rather from ‘modernity,’ which in Europe historians have traditionally dated from the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment.

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