The Saturday Read: Thank you for reading
Inside: Our closing edition of 2023.
Good morning, and welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture. This is Harry, along with Will.
“I returned to a place I barely recognised,” writes James Bennet in The Piece being read across the Atlantic this week: 17,500 words in the Economist on the long fall of the New York Times. Click through for a subtle but strong attack on the paper’s publisher, to whom Bennet reported before being forced to resign in the crazed summer of 2020.
This is the last issue of the Saturday Read in 2023. We hope you have enjoyed reading it this year. If you have any views on the email for 2024 let us know by hitting reply.
1—“What a woman says tends to carry less weight than the same thing said by a man.”
Why don’t men listen to women? If they had before 7 October, or before 9/11, attacks may have been prevented, writes Mary Ann Sieghart. The problem? The authority gap. HL
It’s not as if the women concerned didn’t fight to have their voices heard. The military intelligence officer, working for Unit 8200, Israel’s signal intelligence agency, wrote three documents in the months before the attack. In these, she detailed the preparations that Hamas was undertaking and pointed out the striking similarities to a Hamas battle plan, code-named Jericho Wall, that the intelligence services had got hold of a year before the attack. That plan was enacted almost to the letter on 7 October.
This officer was an expert in Hamas battle techniques. On 6 July, according to leaked emails reported by Israel’s Channel 12, she told her commanders about two platoons of Hamas fighters conducting a military exercise, including practising shooting down a helicopter and fighter jet. She said they seemed to be planning a massive bombardment with mortars, rockets and missiles, neutralising communications with drones, and breaking the fence. They were practising crossing the border into Israel, raiding a kibbutz, attacking a military academy, and killing all the cadets. She told her commanders that Hamas had ended the drill with the words, “We have completed the murder of all the residents of the kibbutz.”
2—“Axel Springer Press? It’s flourishing.”
But why? Quinn Slobodian, newly anointed as a thinker of our time by Prospect, turns his attention to the fissures over Gaza playing out in German public life, where he sees an ascendant right. HL
If national elections were held next week, the AfD would take nearly a quarter of the vote, 6 per cent more than the governing SPD. While the radical centre focuses on stamping out signs of solidarity with a Gazan population whose homes, schools, hospitals and archives are being pounded into dust and placing itself in a tiny global minority opposing a ceasefire, the right grows ever stronger.
3—“The college presidents’ clownishly ambiguous and infirm replies were predictably met with howls of execration.”
What did the testimony of three Ivy League university presidents’ reveal about the American elite? For conservatives it was more evidence that ‘wokeness’ had poisoned everything. For liberals the hearings were a cynical stunt. Lee Siegel reveals what they actually were: a moment of high unseriousness. WL
Only the media, it seems, is obsessed with the incident, especially with Harvard, since much of the elite media is composed of Ivy League graduates – especially Harvard. Not much attention, if any at all, has been paid to the countless pro-Palestinian demonstrations at smaller state schools. And who, after all, but someone who self-flatteringly treasures Harvard as the perfect symbol of status and achievement could think that Stefanik was animated by revenge for being shunned by Harvard rather than by cold political calculation? The rest of the country – for whom Harvard is, if they have any sense of the place at all, either an expensive finishing school dedicated to the high-minded production of high-functioning sociopaths or a perpetual rash on the ageing skin of American meritocracy – really couldn’t care less about what happens there.
4—“It doesn’t take a doctorate of psychology to suppose that Barton is transferring the worst habit of his playing days online.”
Joey Barton was once hailed as top-flight football’s foremost intellectual. He has never quite lived up to the billing. Clive Martin examines a strange career that keeps getting stranger. WL
Barton is the perfect symbol of misplaced British male rage. A man who certainly wasn’t handed the best card in life, who made a lot of mistakes as a young footballer, but one who ultimately refuses to grow in any meaningful way, and instead exploits his notoriety while pulling off an act of cloying, half-hearted contrition. But what’s most disappointing about his actions is that he is, essentially, defending people who never gave him the time of day.
Barton, the child of a broken home on a Huyton estate on Merseyside, was always derided as a lout and an idiot by football’s blazer ’n’ badge men. He was banned by the FA, derided by the tabloids, condemned on Match of the Day, but now he’s defending the institutions to the hilt in embarrassing fashion. It works on the same logic as statue-defending or Farage-admiring. Barton is disgracing himself for an old world that never had a place for him in it.
5—“The treatment by HMRC is actually worse than being defrauded.”
Fraud now accounts for nearly half of all crime in the UK. People are being scammed out of their investments and pensions, and their identities are being used to file fraudulent tax returns. This is a crime that can happen to anyone. But rather than policing its perpetrators, HMRC has spent the last decade going after the victims. Will Dunn investigates.
More than one person described HMRC’s treatment of fraud victims as “a national scandal”, or “the next Post Office scandal”. People from all walks of life have been duped, defrauded or mis-sold investments or tax schemes, and it appears that in almost every case, HMRC’s assumption is that these people colluded with the people who took their money.
Others drew parallels with the tens of thousands of freelancers who loan schemes, sold to them by accountants and financial advisors, to reduce their tax bills, and who have since received “loan charge” demands, often for sums they are unable to pay. HMRC itself has recognised that at least ten people have committed suicide as a result.
6—“This is dullness by design.”
Taylor Swift, like Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian before her, was depicted in tired and saintly fashion by Time magazine when its editors made her its Person of the Year this week. What, Sarah Manavis asks, happened to the celebrity profile? If you want to read a great one, try this. HL
The reality is that this is increasingly what our culture wants and expects from its media. We see it everywhere: Beyoncé’s only interview last summer ahead of her new album, Renaissance, with the British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, heaped embarrassing amounts of praise on its subject, and provided little else; a GQ profile of Kim Kardashian in November was similarly enthusiastic about Kardashian’s ambition and success, without any criticism of the negative impact she’s had on body image and culture. When a figure is scrutinised, it’s typically someone with less fame and power (such as this New York Times interview with Britney Spears’s ex-husband – then fiancé – Sam Asghari, which Asghari claimed violated pre-agreed terms).
7—“On all points, the prognosis is poor.”
Is green capitalism our way out of climate change or is a radical new economic order needed? I’d say the former: “degrowth” will age as well as effective altruism. Growth makes greater redistribution far more politically palatable. Adrienne Buller argues otherwise. HL
As observers simultaneously celebrate and denounce a final agreement that both mentions fossil fuels for the first time and fails to commit to their urgent and vital “phase-out”, it is clear that these negotiations are predicated on a contradiction: the task of agreeing a programme of radical global economic transformation is allocated to those – including, this year, a record 2,500 fossil fuel industry representatives – who stand to lose the most from disrupting the current economic model.
8—“If the notion of ‘Global Britain’ has any residual meaning at all, Pocock’s lifespan might be a suitable paragon for it.”
The great Kiwi historian JGA Pocock died this week shortly before his 100th birthday. Anton Jäger pays tribute to his thought. WL
For a man who dedicated his career to the study of temporality, John Greville Agard Pocock’s passing at the age of 99 on the 13 December – shortly before the historian was due to celebrate his centenary – seems symbolic. It is a truism that historians study historical change. Yet it is quite different for a historian to concern themselves with the history of notions of historical change, and how these notions come to steer human affairs. It was Pocock’s reputation as a historian of historiography which goes a long way explaining his continuing relevance and attraction, next to the uncompromisingly universal scope of his scholarship.
Best of the Rest
Times: There’s “nothing tetchy” about me, says tetchy Sunak.
Sun: Farage tells ITV bosses to “go to hell”. Third prize on I’m a Celebrity… and first prize for gratitude.
Economist: Alexei Navalny is missing.
The Verge: 2023, the year Twitter died.
Duncan Robinson: Keir Starmer needs to cheer up. Dark Labour needn’t be so dark.
Hans Kundnani: Europe is heading for something unthinkable. Keep your eyes on the Germans!
Janan Ganesh: Rishi Sunak discovers that politics isn’t like business.
Saree Makdisi: No human being can exist in Gaza.
Isobel Cockerell: Green colonialism. Great reporting.
Making Nixon Great Again. This may take a while.
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Thanks to Chris Bourn.
Have found Saturday Read the best read out. Not to be missed. Looking forward to 2024—keep it coming, and Thankyou!
That Gaza piece by Makdisi was brilliant - thank you for including.