Motion was filed by prosecutors to restrict storage and use of discovery material turned over to defense in classified papers caseA Florida judge handed prosecutors in Donald Trump's classified documents lawsuit a significant victory on Monday by ruling the former president cannot publicly disclose any of the evidence against him.Trump, who was arraigned in Miami last week on a 37-count indictment over his improper storage and handling of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort, can also only view, but not retain, any of the evidence under the direct supervision of his lawyers, the order from the magistrate judge, Bruce Reinhart, stated. Continue reading...
US's newest federal holiday - signed into law in 2021 - has its roots in the emancipation of Black Americans from slaveryMany Americans are celebrating Juneteenth, marking the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the United States learned they were free.For generations, Black Americans have recognized the end of the darkest chapter in US history with joy, in the form of parades, street festivals, musical performances or cookouts. Continue reading...
At the outset of his ascent in frontline politics, Black Britons warned that Johnson was immoral and unscrupulous. We did tryThere is a Jamaican nugget of wisdom: If yu cyaan 'ear, yu mus' feel." It translates to those that don't hear must feel": in other words, if you fail to learn from caution you end up learning from consequence.Had Britain heard" the screams of caution from Black people about the racism and, therefore, unsuitability for office of Boris Johnson, there is a good chance Britain would not be feeling" the pain and shame of demise we are right now.Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker, and the author of Think Like a White ManDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
Borrowed translations' using English words in Spanish forms make for speech that sounds slightly off to outsiders, study saysFew would doubt Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution in Cuba transformed the look of Miami. The city's vibrant Latin music and dance scene, thriving Cuban coffee bars, cigar shops, restaurants and colorful street art can all be credited to the wealth of culture that crossed the Florida Straits with the hundreds of thousands fleeing the island's new communist regime.Those changes, it turns out, also extend to the way Miami sounds. According to linguistic analysts at Florida International University's center for the humanities in an urban environment, a new dialect has evolved blending Spanish meanings and English words into a colloquial form of language readily understood here by those who speak and hear it, but which just sounds off" to the majority of English-speaking Americans. Continue reading...
Advocacy groups condemn Alliance Defending Freedom as ‘a danger to every American who values their freedoms’With the US besieged by a rightwing culture war campaign that aims to strip away rights from LGBTQ+ people and others, blame tends to be focused on Republican politicians and conservative media figures.But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded rightwing legal organization, experts say. Continue reading...
The invasion has plunged Germany into an agonised debate about its history – this process is only just beginningUnder the veneer of western unity in support of Ukraine, reactions to the war across Europe have been informed by different countries’ readings of their own history, of earlier conflicts on this continent, and by their conceptions of Russia’s national character. There is no automatic consensus within democratic societies about the lessons of the past, nor should there be. Remembrance is often selective, and the way ahead involves a discussion about what went wrong before.Nowhere has this process of revisiting the past in search of the right decisions for the future been more fraught since the Russian invasion than in Germany. Over the past 16 months, the country has ended its heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas, abandoned its reluctance to send weapons to the war zone, and turned into one of Ukraine’s most important military and financial backers after the US. Most Germans now support this policy shift – or Zeitenwende (turning point) as Chancellor Olaf Scholz terms it – but public debate about the future of Germany’s security policy has not stopped. And arguments about history play a prominent part. Continue reading...
Russia urged to fulfil ‘obligations under international humanitarian law’ as death toll from destruction of Kakhovka dam rises to 52. Plus, who really came up with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?Good morning.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is meeting China’s president, Xi Jinping, in Beijing. The talks between Blinken, who is on the first visit to China by a US secretary of state in five years, and Xi began at 4.30pm (0830 GMT).How did the talks go? The US state department called the talks – which were held at an ornate state villa and included a banquet dinner – “candid, substantive and constructive” although they did not appear to make concrete progress on disputes that include Taiwan, trade, human rights and fentanyl.What did Qin say? Behind closed doors, Qin told Blinken that relations between the US and China “are at the lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic relations”, according to the state-run broadcaster CCTV. “This does not conform to the fundamental interests of the two peoples, nor does it meet the common expectations of the international community,” Qin was reported as saying during the talks at the ancient Diaoyutai gardens.What caused the dam to collapse? A team of international legal experts assisting Ukraine’s prosecutors in their investigation said it was “ highly likely” the dam’s collapse was caused by explosives planted by Russians.What else is happening? The Russian military has “highly likely” started relocating troops from the eastern bank of the Dnipro River to Bakhmut and Zaporizhzhia, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update. “The DGF [Dnipro Group of Forces] redeployment likely reflects Russia’s perception that a major Ukrainian attack across the Dnipro is now less likely following the collapse of Kakhovka Dam and the resulting flooding,” the MoD writes. Continue reading...
A San Jose Earthquakes fan upstaged his team and left the crowd stunned with a half-time effort at their game against Portland Timbers. Four supporters were given the challenge of kicking a ball from the penalty area to as close to the centre of the pitch as they could. The first was long, the second was well right of the mark, and the third agonisingly short and to the left. The fourth kick however, was a masterclass in precision, with the ball stopping dead on the mark Continue reading...
by Lauren Miller, with intro by Poppy Noor on (#6C9B0)
Lauren Miller’s fetus had no skull. Her pregnancy threatened her life, and that of her twin boy. Now, she is one of 15 women suing the stateBelow is the journal of Lauren Miller, 36, a long-life Texan who unexpectedly found herself needing abortion care shortly after Roe v Wade was overturned one year ago. When she first started writing the diary, Miller had no idea of the obstacles she was about to face. Now, she is suing the state of Texas with the Center for Reproductive Rights alongside 14 other plaintiffs for being denied access to life-saving abortion care.Miller came to the Guardian wanting to publish the journal – a real-time diary of the twists and turns of going from discovering a very wanted pregnancy, to navigating the need for a termination in a state where abortion is now banned. It has been edited and condensed. Continue reading...
Britain is in thrall to an aristocratic class that feels entitled to power. We don’t need finger-pointing, we need self-reflectionThere are words and phrases that do some heavy lifting in British politics – “populism”, “Brexit”, “legitimate concerns”, the ‘“red wall”. Watch out for them, as in the next few weeks they will be unsparingly deployed to explain how the hell someone like Boris Johnson ever came within sniffing distance of Downing Street.An exercise in orphaning Johnson that has been afoot for a few months will now reach its sad conclusion. His failure will have no fathers and his success will be attributed to an abstract set of conditions that conspired to make his premiership inevitable. Like a monster released from enclosure in an iceberg as it is thawed by a warm weather front, Johnson arrived in Westminster to wreak havoc, until finally the Swat team of British democratic norms and institutions took him out. His critics will issue plaintive laments about the tragedy of a Brexit that carried him into No 10 with a huge majority, and say that he only has himself to blame for coming undone. Continue reading...
A meeting is yet to be confirmed, a day after ‘candid’ talks with China’s foreign minister, who said ties were at their lowest point since diplomatic relations beganAntony Blinken was greeted by China’s top diplomat on Monday, and will perhaps meet its president, on the final day of a rare visit aimed at trying to resurrect relations between Washington and Beijing from historic lows.Neither Blinken nor Wang Yi made any comment to reporters as they greeted each other and sat for their discussion during what is the first visit by a US secretary of state to China in five years. Continue reading...
Pioneer of the ‘chopped-and-screwed’ approach to hip-hop, the musician was once a part of Houston’s Screwed Up ClickLegendary Houston rapper Big Pokey died overnight Sunday after collapsing at a bar in Beaumont, Texas, his publicist has confirmed. The rap star, best known as part of the Screwed Up Click collective, was 48 years old.“It is with deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of our beloved Milton ‘Big Pokey’ Powell,” reads a statement from the rapper’s publicist on behalf of his family. “Big Pokey will forever be ‘The Hardest Pit in the Litter’.” Continue reading...
Brooks Koepka and Matt Fitzpatrick have branded the course ‘diabolical’ and ‘poor’ with West Coast tee times also an issueThe United States Golf Association has become accustomed to firefighting at its marquee event. US Opens became mired in controversy long ago. From watering greens mid-round at Shinnecock Hills to Dustin Johnson’s rules farrago at Oakmont and all manner of complaint about course set-up in between.This is a major that has carried the whiff of cordite as routine. In the background, the USGA is front and centre of a knotty situation regarding whether or not the distance golf balls fly should be rolled back. Continue reading...
White House denies cover-up, but critics say Eva Longoria-helmed Cheetos docu-drama distorts the true story of the spicy snackWhen Joe Biden welcomed actor-director Eva Longoria to the White House for a screening of her Flamin’ Hot drama-documentary last week, the president hailed the story of the Mexican-American one-time janitor Richard Montañez as a tale of “courage”.“When I think about tonight’s movie, I think about courage. So many of you, your ancestors left behind all that they knew to start a new life in the United States,” Biden told the crowd, before the president gave the Desperate Housewives star a hug and made an incomprehensible joke about when she was 17 and he was 40. Continue reading...
Chris Christie calls ex-president a ‘petulant child’ while Mike Pence vows to ‘clean house’ at the justice departmentSome Republican politicians and officials fanned out Sunday to denounce Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents but also to question the motives of the US justice department in bringing an unprecedented 37-count indictment against the former president.Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who announced a run for the Republic presidential nomination last week, called Trump’s conduct outlined in the criminal charges “deeply disturbing”, adding that “we have to have a full trial here and fair one”. Continue reading...
US secretary of state ‘held candid, substantive, and constructive talks,’ state department spokesperson saysUS secretary of state Antony Blinken will seek China’s cooperation in curbing the production of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl during his two-day visit to Beijing, one of several contentious issues that the high-stakes diplomatic outreach will touch on.Aides to Blinken have said the issue will feature prominently in discussions between US and Chinese officials during the trip as the US seeks China’s help in curbing Chinese manufacture of precursor chemicals used to create the drug that helped drive more than two-thirds of 100,000 American overdose deaths in each of the past two years. Continue reading...
US secretary of state’s trip seeks to clear the air but issues such as Taiwan and Ukraine leave limited room for compromiseAntony Blinken has arrived in Beijing on the highest-level trip by a US official since 2018, with his aides signalling he was seeking to build lines of communication rather than secure any practical breakthrough agreements.The expectations, set deliberately low for the two-day talks, allow room for the world’s two largest economies to air their differences over the Taiwan strait, technology, human rights and the war in Ukraine. Continue reading...
It’s great mental health is now openly discussed but the sickest people I’ve known – myself included – have had almost no part in itIn the 12 years since I was diagnosed as manic depressive – now commonly referred to as bipolar type one – mental illness has come roaring out of the woods.Now it’s hard to get through a month without a mental health awareness campaign rearing its well-meaning head. Continue reading...
There have been more than 305 mass shootings in the US so far this year as of Sunday morningAt least 38 people were shot – including two fatally – in three different mass shootings reported Saturday and Sunday in separate parts of the US, according to officials.One minor was killed and nine others were wounded in a shooting in a building in downtown St Louis, Missouri, about 1.45am Sunday, the local television station KMOV reported. The name of the slain victim wasn’t immediately available, and information on the conditions of the wounded wasn’t released right away either.Associated Press contributed reporting Continue reading...
Ten years on, William Fitzgerald, then a 27-year-old policy worker, tells of his part in the story and explores how tech has changed sinceEarly on the morning of 10 June 2013, Hong Kong time, the journalist Glenn Greenwald and film-maker Laura Poitras published on the Guardian site a video revealing the identity of the NSA whistleblower behind one of the most damning leaks in modern history. It began: “My name is Ed Snowden.”William Fitzgerald, then a 27-year-old policy employee at Google, knew he wanted to help. But he didn’t yet know how. Continue reading...
As abortion bans sweep the nation, OB-GYN residents rotate to abortion-supportive states to meet their program requirementsRachel is a third-year OB-GYN resident at a medical institute in Texas and last year, when the Dobbs vote overturned Roe v Wade, her education was derailed. For her safety, she declined to offer her last name or where she studies. In June 2022, the state’s “trigger law” went into effect and abortions became illegal – first after six weeks, now full stop.“I was horrified and angry,” said Rachel, when Roe was reversed. Continue reading...
Cultural colonialism has rightly been rejected – but China’s protest shows that authoritarians can also weaponise traditionThis year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Laboratory for the Future, was inaugurated on the same day that the leaders of the G7 industrialised nations met in Hiroshima. As different as these events appeared, both signalled the end of globalisation. Both also displayed the promise and perils of a fragmenting world.Of all the arts, architecture is the most globally homogenising. Erecting tropical copycats of Paris and London was a staple of European colonial policy. Today, the same glass-and-steel tower blocks dot interchangeable financial capitals the world over. Continue reading...
A white couple challenged an adoption law that protects Native children. Thankfully, the conservative court didn’t buy their argumentA white couple in Texas felt racially discriminated against when facing barriers to adopting a Navajo child. Backed by powerful corporate interests and other non-Native families, the Brackeens brought their grievance to the US supreme court and attempted to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. The “rights” of individuals thereby stood against the collective rights of entire nations of people who were here first in a legal system not of their own making. The Brackeens argued that the law privileges Indians as a race over others, including white families, and is, therefore, unconstitutional. The argument reeked of “reverse racism”, a bogus notion that measures taken to protect marginalized people end up harming white people.The ICWA, however, was designed to reverse a sordid history of Native family separation that benefited white families seeking to adopt Native children. More importantly, the law guarantees that federally recognized tribes have a say in their children’s futures by keeping them with Native families. Those determinations are not based on race but on the political status of tribes and the rights of their members.Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an assistant professer of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is a journalist, historian and the host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance Continue reading...
The private club, which has included Reagan and Nixon among its members, is accused of failing to pay overtime and not giving breaksWorkers at Bohemian Grove, one of the most elite and secretive clubs in the US, have filed a lawsuit alleging numerous unfair labor practices, including 16-hour workdays without breaks, and a failure to pay overtime and minimum wages to the workers.Bohemian Grove, which attracts some of the world’s most powerful people to a mysterious gathering in the woods north of San Francisco, has long been the subject of fascination and conspiracy theories. Continue reading...
We should concentrate on what unites us, from sexual assault to healthcare inequalityJudging by column inches alone, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing keeping women awake at night is not femicide, sexual assault, plummeting rape convictions, stalking, unequal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rampant online misogyny, an institutionally sexist police force, healthcare inequality, insufficient childcare provisions, or never being allowed to age.While all these issues do get reported, a disproportionate amount of attention is given to another topic: men masquerading as trans women in order to gain access to single-sex spaces.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...
We’ve had our fill of prestige TV recently, but sitting back and enjoying the tawdry antics of celebrities battling it out in court is a totally different pleasureI want to be entertained. I find current entertainment lacking. Find my own entertainment? No thank you – I’d like my entertainment presented to me, cut up into bite-size pieces, occasionally pre-chewed. Is that too much to ask? Honestly? That somebody else is responsible for my fun? For bringing something fabulous? Something delightful? After many months consuming prestige TV as if a Michelin meal, dodging online spoilers, I am entering a time in my life where I would like to sit low in a beanbag chair and have a little excitement, a little joy poured directly down my throat like a foie-gras goose. Currently, I have to settle for less.It is no coincidence that reports of the end of “prestige TV” coincide with my own personal exhaustion of the stuff – I have, I believe, singlehandedly maintained this industry through my personal relentless viewing. There is not an award-winning drama I haven’t watched, there is not a darkly comic show investigating grief and/or trauma I haven’t mainlined with biscuits, there is not a philosophical American review I haven’t read solemnly at midnight, occasionally looking up Shakespeare references by the light of a phone. Continue reading...
Barbara Kingsolver and others are no longer oppressed – they dominate book salesThere is a point at which all special treatment becomes patronising. And we have reached that point, I think, when it comes to giving women a leg-up in the business of writing fiction.Genghis Khan sacked and plundered his way through central Asia in just 20 years; women have conquered the literary world with similar thoroughness and in the same time frame. They dominate – the empire is theirs. Do we really still need a Women’s prize for fiction? These days you might as well ask if we need a men’s prize for chess. Continue reading...
A great truth teller has left us. A liar whose mendacity has no equal remains for us to deal withOn Friday, a man who leaked classified national security documents to the press died at the age of 92 at his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Tuesday, a man who took classified documents to his Miami home that was also a resort frequented by a wide array of characters, refused to surrender them, and unleashed a flock of lies about the whole business, was arraigned on 37 felony charges.We know that Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents in the hopes of stopping a war, preventing deaths, and exposing a government that had through five presidencies lied about that war in Vietnam to justify and perpetuate it. We don’t know exactly why Donald J Trump absconded from the White House with top secret material. But there are no good explanations for those boxes stacked on the stage, in the bathroom and spilling on to the floor of a storeroom, and dragged back to another insecure location at Trump’s country club in New Jersey, or for his refusal to surrender the material when the government demanded it.Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses Continue reading...
Blair has joined in the praise for Italy’s former prime minister, a man who was as sad as he was repulsive‘I liked Silvio,” Tony Blair wrote in his autobiography. That was in 2010, when there was possibly some excuse.It was not until 2013 that the late “Silvio” was convicted of tax fraud; charges of false accounting having been dropped after Berlusconi changed the law on false accounting; formal sex charges against him were also yet to come. There were just the two public letters from the second Mrs Berlusconi, Veronica Lario, both denouncing her husband’s pursuit and shameless political promotion of objects of his sexual interest, to suggest that Blair might want to rethink his enthusiasm for a notorious chaser of young women and disrespecter of older ones lest this be mistaken for some sort of endorsement. Continue reading...
The Three Stooges are the stars of rightwing populist melodramas. Real people with real-world problems are more deserving of attentionWhat do Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi have in common? If this sounds like the beginning of an off-colour joke, in a way it is. But the joke’s on us.Huge egos, certainly. Love of money, no doubt. Compulsive lying, untrustworthiness, predatory relationships with women, links to shady characters, media manipulation – in life and death, they shared all this and more. Continue reading...
Elizabeth Gilbert was wrong to stop her novel being published on account of its settingOn 4 September 1939, the day after Britain had declared war on Germany, the BBC Proms opened with extracts from Richard Wagner’s works including The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Götterdämmerung, Tristan and Isolde, Tannhäuser and Die Walküre. Later concerts that year included works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Strauss and a lot of Wagner. The BBC may have been an instrument of Britain’s war effort but few of even the most patriotic Britons thought it immoral to play the works of the great German classical composers.The following year, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which had relocated to Bristol, opened its 1940 concert series with a performance in which the entire second half was given over to Wagner. In response to a letter of complaint, Ralph Hill, the Bristol Evening Post’s music critic, dismissed “the fantastic myth that the music of Wagner cannot or should not be appreciated by civilised people at war with Germany”. Continue reading...
Relatives of Anadith Reyez Álvarez, who died of influenza when detained in Texas, want to ensure ‘nobody has to go through this’Shortly before the funeral on Saturday for an eight-year-old girl who died while she detained by the US border patrol in Texas and stricken with influenza, her relatives vowed to pursue justice in her case so “nobody has to go through this” again.“We will let our baby rest and hope that she rests in peace,” the family of Anadith Reyes Álvarez said in a statement, obtained by the Spanish-language news network Univision. “We want justice for her and that nobody has to go through this.” Continue reading...
President enlists support of union members against GOP tax cuts for the wealthy at first political rally of 2024 re-election campaignAt his first political rally since announcing his re-election campaign for president in April, Joe Biden told a crowd of labor union supporters: “Wall Street didn’t build America – you did.”“If the investment bankers of this country went on strike tomorrow, no one would notice,” Biden said on Saturday during a speech which alluded to his blue-collar childhood roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Renewing his longstanding vocal support for labor unions, he continued: “If this room didn’t show up to work tomorrow, the whole country would come to a grinding halt, so tell me – who matters more in America?” Continue reading...
City bus collides with two cars and then a building in Seton Hill neighborhood, with at least two of 17 injuries believed to be seriousA Baltimore city bus collided into two cars as well as a building on Saturday morning, leaving at least 17 people injured as well as a chaotic scene.The Maryland Transportation Authority bus at the center of the case struck a Lexus car about 10.20am, with the bus then crashing into a Nissan and then part of a building in the 500 block of West Franklin Street in Baltimore’s Seton Hill neighborhood west of downtown. Continue reading...
Horrors at sea will continue until the west faces up to its responsibilities and recognises its part in the plight of refugeesThe nationalities of the several hundred people assumed to have drowned in the latest, terrible migrant boat tragedy in the Mediterranean help explain why they attempted so perilous a journey. Pakistanis, Egyptians, Syrians, Afghans and Palestinians reportedly comprised most of the approximately 750 passengers crammed on to the unseaworthy vessel that set off from Tobruk in Libya and sank 50 miles off the coast of Greece last Wednesday.The list of countries of origin is an index of pain, for which the EU, Britain and their allies bear much responsibility. The west’s failure to stop the Syrian regime’s war on its people led to the 2015-16 migrant crisis, when hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought safety in Europe. Although fighting has subsided, many, including Palestinians living in desperate conditions in camps in the war-torn country, still flee persecution by a vengeful regime, or are quitting an increasingly unaccommodating Turkey.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading...
Bush pilot’s Cessna 180 crashed on Friday near Shaktoolik, Alaska, killing Tweto and his passengerThe bush pilot Jim Tweto, well known as the star of the early 2010s documentary series Flying Wild Alaska on Discovery, died in a plane crash on Friday.The crash which killed Tweto, 68, and passenger occurred about 35 miles north-east of Shaktoolik, Alaska. Continue reading...
If he sincerely believes in integrity in public life, the prime minister must unambiguously endorse the privileges committee’s damning verdict on his predecessorLet’s conduct a dark thought experiment by imagining that Boris Johnson had successfully blagged and bullied the privileges committee into letting him get away with the repeated lies he told about Partygate. Our democracy would be in a very sickly condition this weekend. The Commons would be in disrepute with the public, a thumping majority of whom concluded long ago that the deceitful scoundrel lied about law-breaking in Downing Street. We would be looking at terrible damage to parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which vitally depends on upholding the principle that MPs can expect ministers to give them honest information. If such a manifest deceiver had been let off the hook, it would not have taken long for lying to become institutionalised in parliament. So the excoriating judgment of the privileges committee was not just right, it was also imperative.He greeted their findings with another of his toddler tantrums, screaming about “the final knife-thrust” and “a dreadful day for MPs and for democracy”. To the contrary, this has been one of the brighter moments in the recent history of our democracy. In politics, the media and many other parts of the public square, we are in the midst of a titanic struggle. On the one side are bad actors who seek to advance themselves and their causes by peddling misinformation, mendacity and fakery. Resisting them are those who prize facts, veracity and rules. It was critical that the defenders of integrity in public life prevailed over the forces of darkness. Continue reading...
What we eat defines us as a nation but it also crosses borders and, like Esperanto, helps us communicate globallyFood is an international language: an Esperanto that we all speak pretty fluently, for in the end everyone has to eat. But dialect words are also involved, and sometimes these are a little harder to translate. Last month, in Slovenia, where I was running a writing workshop, I found myself having to explain not only the meaning of the word pasty, but also the various reasons why the appearance of such a thing in a story might be an indicator of social class or even of character. “The author could have had Keith eat a sandwich,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “But he went for a pasty instead because he wants to reveal Keith’s masculine needs to the reader. Basically, Keith is the kind of man who feels himself to be woefully deprived unless he has a hot lunch.” (I know. Eat your heart out, FR Leavis.)All cultures have portable dishes: in this sense, the pasty comes with an in-built universality, one my students grasped immediately (or at least they did once Google provided us with a picture). Then again, made properly, the Cornish pasty is also highly specific. Its recipe, as we know, is not to be messed with, and here’s where things got trickier. Keith, the bloke in the book we were talking about, is an old-school, pedantic type, which may be another reason why his usual lunch appeals to him; he gets to pass judgment on it as well as eat it. Continue reading...
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