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3 MIN READ TIME

Taking stock

Tom Clark

Downing tools for the summer usually provides a rare chance to stop, take stock and-if need be-rethink. Ordinarily it’s a brief but precious window, unmatched at any other time except, perhaps, new year. How diff erent things are in 2020. The summer “break” for many of us will involve staying in the same home where we have, in effect, been “paused” since the fi rst stirrings of spring.

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Aug/Sep 2020
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Up front
Contributors
Leonard Benardo is vice president of the Open Society
Letters
America is in terminal decline; China is on the rise;
Opinions
Call time on “cancel culture”-and hold on to your friends
How different are your friends? If you had to assemble
A common cause, an ocean apart
Black Lives Matter protesters in Britain have shown
A coup dressed up in statute
The new national security law that Beijing has imposed
The governance of Britain
As No 10 eyes up sweeping reforms to how the country is run, three senior fi gures who know Whitehall from the inside give their take
Lawyers: as culpable as any slaver
A slave is a human being who is the property of someone
A stadium of the dead
Who should we blame for Brazil’s death toll? According
How racist is Britain?
With race top of the agenda, how much disadvantage
Should we aim to get the economy back to “business as usual”?
YES It is tempting, when living through a once-in-a-century
Essays
The world’s top 50 thinkers for the Covid-19 age
For details on how to cast your vote, see p32
White lies matter
A mythological idea of Anglo- Saxon supremacy has long entrenched racial hierarchies on both sides of the Atlantic
In place of hope
All identity politics is a dead end. But the politics of white identity is a dangerous dead end
The politics of atonement
The crimes of every nation are different. So too must be the way it makes up for them
GETTING SOMEWHERE
THE POLITICAL CLASS HAS LEARNED THE HARD WAY HOW MUCH PEOPLE’S SENSE OF PLACE MATTERS. IT IS HIGH TIME ECONOMISTS CAUGHT UP
A world with less travel
Our aviation addiction was threatening the planet. After the grounding of lockdown, can we finally kick the habit?
I was Saddam’s prisoner
How a holiday to Iraq in the summer of 1990 turned into a months-long nightmare
Daylight robbery
How cities are putting their sunlight up for sale
Titan of the west
As the Atlantic alliance that Ernest Bevin helped to forge 70 years ago finally begins to fray, a new biography recounts his remarkable journey from dogsbody and delivery boy to world-shaping statesman
Trump’s brain
The playboy president brought a clever, cultured and righteously conservative lawyer into his tent. Is US Attorney General William Barr now ready to bend any rule to win him a second term?
Zooming out
Since the first camera lens, virtual technologies have changed the way we see the world. In our new age of video communication, they touch on everything from office meetings to sex- but at what cost?
Arts and books
American pantheon
Comics artist Stan Lee created memorable superheroes who embody the deep conflicts at the heart of the US, writes Sam Leith
Family matters
Anne Tyler’s masterful new novel asks what it might take for an unhappy man to change his life, finds Benjamin Markovits
State of (half) the nation
Ali Smith’s last-minute novels mix and match different times and places. But on issues like Brexit she struggles with the opposing side, finds Anthony Cummins
Deaths by morning
Sarah Moss’s uncanny fiction has an explosive combination of the historical and personal, writes Catherine Taylor
YOUNG OFFENDER
After leading a life of crime on the streets of South Kilburn, the narrator has to survive in the harsh environment of Feltham jail. Author Gabriel Krauze explains: “Often the truth is disturbing and ugly. Everything in this story was experienced by me in one way or another- otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tell it. It’s a world full of untold stories, a reality that most people only catch a glimpse of in the news and on TV, but which is lived by many on the edge of society’s gaze. This is the life I chose”
Books in brief
Surviving Autocracy
Recommends
Emma Crichton-Miller
Prospectlife
Singular bonds
The single are used to their private lives being deemed
Winds of change
At the beginning of lockdown, I heard a lot of discussion
Loving the local
Iwas born in London at the tail end of the 1980s and
Twists in the tragic tale
Sometimes I look at Boris Johnson and wonder, did we
The way we were
Extracts from memoirs and diaries compiled by Ian Irvine
In search of showmen
Music festivals are off this year, of course. There
Policy & money
Policy report: NHS infrastructure
What recovery for a traumatised health service?
Economics and investment
The analyst: Paul Wallace
Endgames
The generalist by Didymus
Each completed grid will contain solutions beginning
Enigmas & puzzles
Time to coax those neurons out of lockdown and enter
Brief encounter
Author