From despotisms like the Soviet Union the only voices that tell one anything are the voices of private life. These distinguish the sporadic correspondence of Olga Freidenberg with her first cousin Boris Pasternak between 1910 and 1954. She was in Leningrad, he mostly in Moscow. Forty-five years of this harassed exchange of news and affection come out of their cold envelopes and bring us close to the dire and confusing realities of their time. The cousins were born in 1890 in distinguished and cultivated families who were assimilated Jews. (One can guess at their hopeful childhood and youth in Pasternak’s early writings.) We see them first in 1910 and—after the long gap of the First World War—in touch with each other again through the Second World War and the Stalinist terror, until 1954, the year before she died.
They write to each other as loving friends who are co-equals—as Elliott Mossman, the editor of the letters, says—she the academic, classical scholar whose interests are philology and the history of culture, who has been able to take advantage of the opening of the Academy to women after the Revolution. She became a professor. She was never famous. She survived the Stalin purges by the skin of her teeth—as she wrote in her vigorous diaries that were somehow hidden and now lie in Oxford. (Many passages from these are interleaved with her part of the correspondence.) Her thesis Poetics of Plot and Genre was published in 1936 but in a few weeks was confiscated and denounced because of its “formalism” and scholarly style.
She is said to have been alluring and mischievous as a young girl. Pasternak fell in love with her and this shocked her. She thought of him strictly as a brother. He was too vain, “difficult,” egotistical, incalculable, and elusive; whereas she was strong, settled, and determined in will. Pasternak impatiently threw away letters and records; she was the born archivist who hoarded copies—an alarming gift in a country where all records could be incriminating—but it is thanks to this gift that their letters have survived. A lifetime of letters between two people who rarely met but who had the family bond is a chaos, but Mr. Mossman has made them intelligible by inserting a series of historical introductions to each period of their lives. Her diaries are at their most dramatic in their pictures of the siege of Leningrad and in her account of the scandalous attempt of powerful Party hacks (and Izvestia) to get her dismissed for not being in accord with the changing directives of Marxism. Her difficult and feckless brother Sasha and his uncongenial wife were sent to a labor camp. This imperiled her own embittering situation.
The Pasternak family bond was of great importance to her. She felt it was at the heart of her passionate concern for history. She knew she belonged to a family that was “great and exceptional” in its culture:
In this lies my faith, my faith and absolute reverence for the objective process above and beyond human beings…. I am speaking, of course, not of written history, but of history as a world process. In this process nothing is discarded or forgotten. The ideas about heaven, immortality, the other world, conceived by the peoples of the earth are all true—not as heaven or paradise or Valhalla, but as history. It is impossible to deceive history no matter how documents are falsified or facts distorted and concealed.
She fought back desperately during the purges, when she was officially called upon to fake. The students were directed by the Party to shadow and inform on their professors. She was directed to lower the marks of white-collar workers and to raise those of blue-collar workers. She refused point blank.
It takes a great deal of patience to find the central concern of Robert Colvile latest essay, hidden in the Tory Weeds, his retorical speciality:
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On migration and race in particular, the state has long been similarly reluctant to publicise, or even collect, data that might prove awkward.
Recently a report commissioned by Thames Water became public. It estimated — based on water usage, plus 2017-era migration surveys by Pew Research — that there were between 390,355 and 585,533 illegal migrants in London. But the company had kept the report private. And remarkably the government produces no official estimates of its own — partly because of the decision under a certain Tony Blair to abolish exit checks at the borders.
It’s not just about the number of illegal migrants. We don’t have good data on what nationalities are filling our prisons, or what crimes they committed. Or who is getting national insurance numbers. Or how much they are earning. Sometimes this “data desert” is a result of deliberate obstruction. Sunday Times journalists investigating the infected blood scandal, or the Horizon debacle, can testify to the levels of obfuscation of which the state is capable. Sometimes the explanation is a species of thoughtlessness. We don’t get data on the nationality of criminals, but the police are supposed to record their ethnicity. Yet as the Tory MP Neil O’Brien has pointed out, many officers have stopped doing so, making the statistics worthless.
The reader must give Mr. Colevile credit for this opening gambit, featuring Tony Blair! Colvile on Blair breaks new ground, or just resembles political oportunism: Blair’s quote ‘I quake at the imbecility of it’ is Blair in the confessional? Colvile’s readerships blood quickins!
What was Tony Blair’s worst mistake? I imagine you’ll all have a view. But the man himself offers a surprising nomination. In the middle of his autobiography he breaks off for a page-long rant about the Freedom of Information Act. “You idiot,” he berates himself. “You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.”
Blair’s argument is that journalists’ use of his new law to expose the government’s secrets prevented ministers and officials from having honest conversations. Its remit, he argues, strayed “far beyond what it was sensible to disclose”.
Editor: The end of Colevil’s intervention does not quite match it’s beginning, I’ll end my comment here!
David Brooks’s political evolution from The Weekly Standard Neo-Con, and author of his ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ now avalable at the Washington Examiner site:
The political evolution of Brooks as writer of not just dubious, but meagar War propaganda, framed by his wan hero ‘20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa’. Reader consider some of the other members of his cast of charcters:
Editor: The Dream Palaces ‘citizenship’ is enumerated in 157 words. Its like a novel written by Ayn Rand!
George Orwell, Fouad Ajami, the Arabists, Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade, the Middle East is a Crusade, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor,any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor,Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause, the Arab world are never the Arabs’ fault., the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame., of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the world. In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear.
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Editor: what remain of this Neo-Con wet dream is 2737 words: what power does this ‘essay’ possesse is to convince the reader to accept as true Brooks’s mastery of the politics of War Mongering. In sum Mr. Brooks writes a long winded ratinalization for Bush The Youngers, Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelds War On Terror: the toxic effects of which are alive and floreishng in the political present!
Editor: The evolution of Brooks from unapologetic war monger, to a New York Times voice of resistance to Trump and Trumpism, places in a conveient shadow, the facts that Brooks was a toxic political actor, who has been very adroit about his carefully crafted political evolution, at The New York Times. To an ersatz ‘voice of reason’ as presented in the first paragraphs of his latest commentary.
After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.
Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.
You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.
It’s easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.
Editor: Here is Friedman’s latest essay of a mere & compact 1,509 words, respectfully addressing President Trump.
Headline: President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare
Dear President Trump:
You may not be interested in Jewish or Arab history, but they are both very interested in you today. This is one of those rare moments — like after World War I, World War II and the Cold War — when everything in the Middle East is in play and everything is possible. And right now, everyone is waiting for you.
No exaggeration: You have a chance to reshape this region in ways that could fundamentally enhance the peace and prosperity of Israelis, Palestinians and all the region’s people, as well as the national security interests of America.
Be advised, though, while the wages of success will be enormous, the consequences of failure will be utterly hellish. It’s the Nobel Prize or the booby prize. Yet there is no escaping this mission. The Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.
On every train schedule there is something known as the last train. Well, when it comes to peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians, before Israeli West Bank settlements totally choke off any possibility of a two-state deal; to ending Lebanon’s 50-year civil war, while there is still a shred of hope; to giving Syria a chance to reintegrate after 14 years of strife; and to neutralizing Iran before it gets a nuclear bomb, this really feels like a last train.
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Editor: The Reader might just recall another Friedman execise in political prescience?
A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big.
Jan. 31, 2024
There are two things I believe about the widening crisis in the Middle East.
We are about to see a new Biden administration strategy unfold to address this multifront war involving Gaza, Iran, Israel and the region — what I hope will be a “Biden Doctrine” that meets the seriousness and complexity of this dangerous moment.
And if we don’t see such a big, bold doctrine, the crisis in the region is going to metastasize in ways that will strengthen Iran, isolate Israel and leave America’s ability to influence events there for the better in tatters.
A Biden Doctrine — as I’m terming the convergence of strategic thinking and planning that my reporting has picked up — would have three tracks.
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Editor: Reader note the final paragraphs of Friedman’s latest essay; ‘otherwise, it needs to be done kinetically’ is the place holder for War!
Finally, on Iran, Israel has done the world a huge favor in stripping this awful, corrupt, repressive regime of much of its ability to project power around the region through failing states and proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen while hiding behind Tehran’s nuclear program.
That nuclear program and Iran’s malign regional strategy need to be eliminated. I hope you can do it through peaceful negotiations; otherwise, it needs to be done kinetically. The more credibly we threaten the second, the more likely we will get the first.
Good luck, Mr. Trump. History has its eyes on you.
On January 13 2025, spreads between yields on 10-year gilts and German Bunds reached 230 basis points. This was four basis points higher than the peak reached on September 27 2022, when Liz Truss was prime minister. The UK is probably not heading for a borrowing crisis. But its position is fragile. The government must reinforce confidence in the soundness of the UK and its own good sense.
Interest rates have risen across the G7. Even in Germany, the yield on the ultra-long 30-year Bund rose by 290 basis points between January 15 2021 and January 15 2025. In the US, the rise was 300 basis points, and in France 350 points. Alas, the rise in UK yields was the highest in the G7, at 440 basis points. UK yields on 30-year gilts reached 5.2 per cent in mid-January. This was the highest level in the G7, while German yields were only 2.8 per cent and French ones still only 3.9 per cent. But US yields were not so far behind UK levels, at 4.9 per cent, probably because of the huge structural fiscal deficits in the global economic superpower.
In sum, UK yields on long-term debt have risen by more and reached higher levels than in peer countries. Yields on 30-year gilts were even 56 basis points higher than Italy’s on January 15. Moreover, while UK yields had risen 78 basis points in the previous year, Italy’s did not rise at all. That is embarrassing. A crucial question is why rates have risen. The big change has been in the real rate of interest, not inflation expectations. In the UK case, we have reasonably robust measures of both, from yields on index-linked and conventional gilts. The difference between the two indicates inflation expectations and perceptions of inflation risk.
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Editor: The Reader just might look at 14 years of Tory Economic incompetence, succeded by Kier Starmer’s ‘Tribute Band’s’ version: Tony Blairs wayward pupil, in the political present, has met the Liz Truss’ bench mark?
Editor: Mr. Wolf maintaines his composure, as this whole essay remaines in the very high-flown register of ‘Economics’ , enuciated by a master of the genre!
In brief, the UK’s situation is fragile. The government needs to retain the confidence of its creditors. It is crucial not to adopt policies that raise doubts about its good sense. How taxes were raised in the Budget did just that. So, too, do regulatory developments, notably in the labour market. The government will have to toughen its stance on current spending in its coming review or consider higher taxes.
The UK must focus on resilience and growth. Panic is unnecessary, but the era of cheap borrowing is over. Policy has to respond.
Editor: The Reader of The Financial Times needn’t wonder about the political strategy of this Neo-Liberal/Neo-Conservative Hybrid! 1,248 words later The Reader realizes that this essay, shorn of its Techno-Chatter, allied to some scolding of Senile Old Joe: another Hybred composed of Sullivan, Blinken & the toxic Hillary Clinton, behind the curtain! Tej Parikh and Keith Fray essay eventually realises itself in the jejune!
Joe Biden has won plaudits internationally for presiding over an economy that has achieved stellar growth. But as he prepares to step down on Monday, many Americans feel they are worse off than when the president took office.
Biden’s four-year term spanned a period of global economic upheaval, from the coronavirus pandemic and the worst inflation shock in a generation to rising tensions with China. Yet data compiled by analysts at BCG shows that Donald Trump will take office with one of the strongest economic backdrops of any president since Jimmy Carter. “Biden inherited a Covid-battered economy and he is bequeathing an exceptionally strong one,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
The US unemployment rate is near historical lows, and inflation is falling, albeit slowly. The S&P 500 has also risen more than 50 per cent since Biden’s term began.
US economic policy, meanwhile, has moved further from free-market orthodoxy towards a bigger role for the state. “Bidenomics”, in the president’s own words, was about “growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up”.
But many American voters — including those towards the bottom of the income scale — believe the country’s economic resilience failed to benefit them.
Editor: A comic iterlude, featuring Ronald Reagan.
His policies, including the $369bn Inflation Reduction Act, did not cut through to the general public, failing what political analysts refer to as the “Reagan test”.
In the final debate of the 1980 presidential race, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan asked the public: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” A survey from the University of Michigan shows that Americans of all income bands feel the answer to that question under Biden is a resounding “no”.
In the run-up to the election, Americans consistently thought Trump would be better at handling the economy than the president, according to the Financial Times-Michigan Ross polls.
Inflation, which surged to a multi-decade high during Biden’s term, ranked as voters’ number-one concern.
While many economists blamed the surge in prices on global factors such as supply chain snags, others say his $1.9tn American Rescue Plan in 2021 — which provided direct stimulus payments to households — played a critical role in raising the cost of everyday essentials such as eggs, bread and rent.
Though the budget deficit as a share of GDP has fallen, it remains uncomfortably high, at an estimated 6.4 per cent. The federal debt is also on an upward trajectory, the scale of which the independent Congressional Budget Office has described as “unprecedented”.
Loose monetary policy when Biden became president also contributed to the post-pandemic increase in prices. That left the Federal Reserve playing catch-up, using bumper interest rate rises of up to 75 basis points at a time to quell price pressures.
While inflation is now closer to rate-setters’ 2 per cent goal, the interest rate increases damped the economic mood by leaving borrowing costs at their highest level for more than two decades.
Consumer prices, meanwhile, remain more than 20 per cent higher than in January 2021.
“What did the Democrats in was inflation,” said Stephen Moore, a former senior economic adviser to Trump.
Other economists point out that the administration made some advances for working families, such as temporarily expanding the child tax credit and providing more support for healthcare insurance
Low-wage workers also experienced the fastest real wage growth of any income group under Biden, according to the Economic Policy Institute. More Americans are also in work than when he started his term.
But much of the Covid-era support was temporary and poorly targeted, according to analysts.
The child poverty rate rebounded after initially falling by half, while plans to permanently enlarge social welfare programmes failed.
“The administration couldn’t overcome legislative opposition to labour law reform or to raising the federal minimum wage,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at EPI, adding that the administration’s gamble that its progressive policies would become too popular to remove backfired. “Progressives need to not bank on programmes creating their own constituency.”
Despite a sturdy jobs market and stimulus cheques, many of the poorest Americans still feel worse off than when Biden entered the White House.
Low-income households spend more of their income on essentials, which jumped the most in price, according to research by Oxford Economics.
“The irony of Biden’s presidency was that lower- and middle-income households suffered the most,” said Moore.
With savings built up during the pandemic now largely spent, the share of loan balances in serious debt delinquency — defined as late payments of 90 days or more — on credit cards and auto loans are near their highest since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Despite the Biden administration’s focus on “middle-class Americans”, it has been corporate America that has really boomed, particularly as enthusiasm over artificial intelligence pushed equity prices higher.
Though under its chief Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission was aggressive in bringing antitrust cases to Big Tech, Trump’s new team — with its ties to tech billionaires such as Elon Musk — is expected to give the sector a freer hand.
Economists believe that over time Biden’s industrial strategy — pursued not only through the IRA but also the Chips Act and protectionist policies placed on Chinese competitors — will leave a bigger mark on the American economy.
“The balance will shift in favour of Biden as the memory of the inflation shock fades,” said Ian Shepherdson, editor-in-chief at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “The transformations wrought by his investment programmes continue to deliver broad benefits across the whole economy.”
The White House estimates that private companies have committed $1tn in investment as part of Biden’s packages — just under half of that has been in electronics and chips.
New factories and battery plants have sprouted across the country. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co recently started producing advanced four-nanometer chips for US customers in Arizona.
“There is now emerging bipartisan consensus on the government’s role in re-industrialisation,” said Daniel Correa, chief executive of the Federation of American Scientists. “Whether we call it industrial strategy or not.”
But both the IRA and Chips act have faced setbacks.
An FT investigation in August found that 40 per cent of projects of at least $100mn announced within the first year of the laws had been paused or delayed. Labour shortages, permitting problems and local sourcing requirements were cited as obstacles
A promised boom in manufacturing jobs has also been absent so far. Job creation under Biden has been driven by the public sector, services, and health and social care.
The effort to recreate global industrial supply chains at home more broadly has been criticised by economists for being wasteful and undermining free trade.
Recent research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates the average subsidy per job created under the Chips Act could be about twice the average annual salary of US semiconductor employees.
The packages are also expected to be trimmed by Trump’s administration, though the prevalence of new investments in Republican states could keep them alive in some form.
Many believe Biden leaves behind a strong, but highly indebted economy.
“Just as Trump inherited a strong economy in 2017, the same is happening in 2025,” said Maurice Obstfeld, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute think-tank. “[But] Biden’s legacy is mixed. His achievements came with collateral damage such as raising inflation, the deficit and protectionist barriers.
“His policies either had long lag times, were temporary, or simply did not cut through to voters . . . For now, the winners are in a position to try to write history,” Obstfeld added.
Editor: This cadre of dullards, can’t face the Political Monster they, and the NBC Television Network, nurtured/created!
Patrick Healy: We’re at a historical moment that Americans have experienced only once before — the inauguration of a president who previously held the office and was turned out, only to win election again four years later. None of us were alive in 1893, so I want to explore how you’re making sense of it now. First, what do you remember thinking or feeling about Trump when his presidency began eight years ago?
Ross Douthat: What was the supposed George W. Bush line, upon hearing Trump’s Inaugural Address? “That was some weird [expletive]”? I think the weirdness was important, the fundamental surrealism, the sense that this was just not how normal American politics worked — something that was felt quite widely. And with it, the sense that if you just pulled the right political lever or legal maneuver, you could get back to the normal world and leave Trump world behind.
Michelle Goldberg: I went to that rally in Columbus Circle where Bill DeBlasio and stars like Cher and Robert DeNiro spoke. I remember feeling true terror about what was coming, but also a lot of solidarity with my fellow New Yorkers.
David Brooks: I was mostly morally appalled. It was like watching Larry Flynt get elected pope.
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