Persistent Presence
Elizabeth Schmidt
On 16 May, just months after the United States precipitously withdrew from Afghanistan, President Biden announced that US ground troops would return to Somalia and establish a ‘persistent presence’ – reversing the Trump-era withdrawal. His top general for Africa, Stephen Townsend, attested that since the US departure in January 2021, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the country had grown ‘bigger, stronger, and bolder’. After a decade and a half of US and African Union training, the Somali national army was still unable to defend its territory. In response, Biden’s team have defaulted to the classic US policy of endless war.
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Crowd Pleaser
James Wham
Ruben Östlund was awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s top honour this year, winning the Palme d’Or for Triangle of Sadness. He joins a rarefied group of directors – one that includes fellow Swede Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppolla, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, the Dardenne brothers and Ken Loach – to have won the award more than once; he now has as many as all female directors combined. Following Michael Haneke and Billie August, he is the third director to receive the award for back-to-back films, having also won in 2017 for his fifth film The Square. The two projects are not so differently shaped: while The Square looks at the art world and the wealthy idiots who inhabit it; Triangle of Sadness begins with the fashion world before moving on to wealt
hy idiots more generally.
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Subterranea
Jennifer Hodgson
‘Has anyone seen Rosemary Tonks?’ began an unusual announcement in London’s Evening Standard in November 1998. The request was on behalf of the publisher Bloodaxe Books, who were keen to reissue her poetry but explained that ‘we haven’t managed to speak to anyone who’s seen her since the seventies’. At the close of the decade Tonks had seemingly vanished, absconding from Hampstead and her career as a celebrated writer. No further poetry appeared, no new novels were added to the run of six that she’d published between 1963 and 1972, and it was widely believed she’d put a ban on anyone ever republishing them.
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