Month: November 2015

Against austeritarianism

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Bri­tish stu­dents have descen­ded again on the streets to claim the right to study, under assault as never before from the Con­ser­va­tive govern­ment. The pro­test, orga­ni­zed ini­tially by mem­bers of the Natio­nal Cam­paign Against Fees and Cuts, even­tually won the bac­king of many other stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions in the wake of dra­co­nian cuts and unsu­stai­na­ble increa­ses in tui­tion fees dic­ta­ted by the Tories’ auste­rity agenda.

The rest on the newly-launched, impossibly glamorous global edition of Il manifesto

Contro la svolta austeritaria

Gli stu­denti bri­tan­nici sono scesi ancora una volta in piazza per riven­di­care il diritto allo stu­dio, sotto assalto come mai prima da parte del governo con­ser­va­tore in carica. La mani­fe­sta­zione, orga­niz­zata ini­zial­mente dai mem­bri della Natio­nal Cam­paign Against Fees and Cuts, ha finito per rice­vere l’adesione di molte altre orga­niz­za­zioni stu­den­te­sche sulla scia delle tagli dra­co­niani e degli aumenti inso­ste­ni­bili delle tasse uni­ver­si­ta­rie det­tati dall’agenda «auste­ri­ta­ria» dei Tories.

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Completely relevant anniversaries – Pier Paolo Pasolini

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Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose notoriously controversial death happened 40 years ago to the day, was the last truly great Italian intellectual of the XX century: greater than Calvino – who was maybe better than him as a novelist, but was not a poet, an essayist and most of all a film maker as PPP – and Leonardo Sciascia, whose musings on mafia-permeated Sicily were, despite their courage, more parochial.

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Completely irrelevant anniversaries – Bohemian Rhapsody

Our popular culture is full of irrelevant anniversaries. Like that of Bohemian Rhapsody, for a start: one of the most overblown, pretentious, cheesy and nonsensical singles in the whole of popular music.

Its only merit? To encompass everything that is wrong about Seventies’ rock.

Its worst guilt? To have inspired one of the most overblown, pretentious, cheesy and nonsensical contemporary “rock” bands: Muse.