THE GUARDIAN – General | World News & Events

Alex Gibney’s documentary follows the celebrated author’s life up to and after the attack, but what shines through is Rushdie’s remarkable courageThe terrifying, inspiring story of how Salman Rushdie survived and thrived after the assassination attempt on him in New York in 2022 is the subject of this excellent documentary from Alex Gibney. It is based on Rushdie’s own memoir, narrated extensively by the author himself, and using the intimate hospital-bedside video footage shot by his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. There are stomach-turningly explicit shots of Rushdie’s damaged eye and also, finally, horrendous scenes of the attack itself. What emerges is Rushdie’s courage and his remarkably level-headed, calm and unafraid writerly voice insisting on the primacy of literature, freedom of expression and the life of the imagination.The film itself takes us from Rushdie’s childhood in Mumbai (with a certain unselfconscious locution of his class and background, Rushdie still calls it “Bombay”), to the years of bullying and unhappiness at an English public school, then Cambridge, London, his day job in advertising (he is cheerfully delighted by his successful campaign for Aero chocolate). Then there is writing fiction and the big breakthrough with his magic-realist creation myth Midnight’s Children. We get a lot of footage of him in black-tie at awards, which is how he appeared in the media: a crude jihadi placard actually shows him in a bow tie. Continue reading... [TheTopNews] Read More.

In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler’s NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism’s electoral breakthroughWith your art collective Centre for Political Beauty you famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property next to the home of an AfD politician. Now you’ve written a history book about the Nazis’ rise to power. Don’t we already know everything there is to know about the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act of 1933?About three years ago I became interested in how Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP) rose to prominence when Germany was still a democracy, because I hoped it could tell us something about the success of rightwing extremist movements today. From looking at historical sources, I realised that the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 were in many ways more important than what happened in 1932 and 1933. And I expected it to be an open-and-shut case. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that most of the theories we have to explain the rise of the Nazis don’t make sense – the data tells a completely different, far darker story. Continue reading... [TheTopNews] Read More.

A new Taschen book comprising 700 images from the National Geographic’s archives charts a dramatic century of dizzying change in the US Continue reading... [TheTopNews] Read More.

This tale of a 60s college dropout driving across the US to avoid being sent to Vietnam is committed to both readerly pleasure and literary artificePatrick deWitt broke through with a western, 2011’s Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers. Now, he has taken on another hallowed American genre: the road novel. Recent works by Miranda July and Ben Markovits have, in very different ways, used the idea of the road trip as a way to dramatise midlife crisis. As befits a writer who is, in so many ways, a throwback, Dodge City returns the genre to its roots: the 1960s, and youth as opposed to middle age. A short précis – a cross-country journey undertaken by a UCLA drop-out armed only with a bag of amphetamines – makes the book sound like an Easy Rider tribute. It is typical for deWitt novels to be compared to films rather than other books. But in this case, something very different transpires.The novel opens with our protagonist, Leland “Lee” Clarke, receiving his draft notice – he is to be sent to Vietnam. He has just been expelled from UCLA for assaulting a fellow student, a rich hippy who condescends to him. This “event of violence” (a “one-punch wonder”, as Lee’s father calls it) costs him his draft deferment. Lee doesn’t consider himself a conscientious objector – that is only another form of heroism, and “the myth of the hero is at the heart of my critique of the entire exercise”. But nor does he want to go to Vietnam. He decides, instead, to dodge – to head to Canada. Younger readers may note with envy that being kicked out of college mattered a lot less when you weren’t tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Continue reading... [TheTopNews] Read More.

Some rivers are receiving more rain than before but have lower water flow, according to a studyMore rain and snow equals more water in rivers, right? Not necessarily. A new study shows that, despite receiving more rainfall than they used to, river water levels are falling because of changes in climate.Global heating is intensifying the hydrological cycle, making wet regions wetter and dry regions drier, but how is this affecting river flow? Researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, in the US, have analysed precipitation and river flow records in more than 10,000 rivers between 1951 and 2020. In nearly one-third of rivers, they found that flow trends did not match with the changes observed in rainfall and snow. Continue reading... [TheTopNews] Read More.