The Guardian has never been much of a business. Its owners never got rich; in fact, they gave the newspaper away. Its history is peppered with financial crises and near-death experiences. Perhaps it was placed on earth to make “righteousness readable” (in the centenary words of Lord Robert Cecil), but the paper has nearly always struggled to make it remunerative.
And yet this year it is celebrating its two hundredth anniversary. Born on the day Napoleon Bonaparte died—May 5, 1821—The Guardian now has around $1.4 billion in the bank, more than a million paying supporters or subscribers, and profitable operations in the US and Australia, which enable it to report around the clock and to reach well over 1.5 billion online readers around the world every year. Not bad for a paper that began life being cranked out on a primitive handpress at 125 copies an hour.
Since I couldn’t control the publishing industry, I decided to concentrate on what I could, which was writing itself. This meant focusing on the quality of my work and how often I submitted it. Soon, my sense of accomplishment shifted toward goals I could actually complete (editing a draft, pitching a magazine) instead of ones I couldn’t (publishing a book to great acclaim before age 30).
After writing two family memoirs that involved a lot of grueling soul-searching, Alison Bechdel thought she would focus on something more lighthearted for her next book — exercise.
But for the creator of such rich, introspective works as “Fun Home,” the heartbreaking story of her coming out and her father’s death, staying on the surface was no easy task.
From the medium’s beginnings, starting in 1839, photographers sought to have their work recognized as art. Indeed, the modern history of photography has been written as a kind of pilgrim’s tale, a major plotline of which is a progressive discovery of the medium’s unique artistic nature following a series of unsatisfying imitative encounters with the arts of painting and drawing.
Rising a mere 3,000 feet above the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the seemingly diminutive volcanic isle is famed for its near-continuous summit explosions. Most volcanoes spend much of their lifetime in a state of quiescence, but Stromboli bucks that trend. “It’s always active,” said Maurizio Ripepe, a geophysicist at the University of Florence in Italy. “I always say it’s the most reliable thing in Italy. It’s not like the trains.”
Lewis’s approach here is to find a small number of unheralded individuals working within vast systems, and use them to portray the workings (or, in this case, not-workings) of those systems. The malevolent force in The Premonition is institutional malaise. Lewis’s underlying argument here, though, is hardly compatible with the conservative “big government doesn’t work” boilerplate, which posits centralisation as the root of all societal evil. Rather, he portrays a system that is both incredibly vast and insufficiently centralised. “There’s no one driving the bus,” as Joe DeRisi, one of Lewis’s main subjects, puts it. DeRisi, a biochemist who developed an extremely useful technology for rapid viral testing, spends much of the book banging his head against institutional brick walls in an attempt to get his innovation adopted as part of a wider campaign against Covid.