Gavin Jacobson

London

Editor at The New Statesman

Writer at The Salvo

TK | Previously @newstatesman

Featured in: Favicon

newstatesman.com Favicon

theguardian.com Favicon

ft.com

newyorker.com Favicon

nybooks.com Favicon

thenation.com Favicon

newrepublic.com Favicon

lrb.co.uk

frieze.com Favicon

caravanmagazine.in + 6 more

Articles

The Salvo, vol. 9: Kakistocracy (Part 1)

Apr 11, 2024 | thesalvo.substack.com | Gavin Jacobson |John Ganz

Welcome to the ninth edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: why 1990s America was so terrible. Next week, I am planning to interview the writer John Ganz, whose forthcoming book, When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, you can pre-order here. You should also check out John’s excellent Substack, Unpopular Front.
The Zone of Interest and garden variety Nazis

Mar 29, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Gavin Jacobson

In a series of letters written between 1771 and 1773, Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned his friend, Madame Étienne Delessert, against the practice of horticulture. Commonly thought of as a philosopher, Rousseau’s abiding interests were music and, especially in the declining years of his life, botany. If the study of plants was respectable and salutary, the landscaping of gardens, he thought, where the imprint of the gardener’s hand deforms nature, was a grotesque enterprise performed by monsters.
The Salvo, vol. 7: Garden variety Nazis

Mar 28, 2024 | thesalvo.substack.com | Gavin Jacobson

Welcome to the seventh edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: Landscaping the human garden. In a series of letters written between 1771 and 1773, Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned his friend, Madame Étienne Delessert, against the practice of horticulture. Commonly thought of as a philosopher, Rousseau’s abiding interests were music and, especially in the declining years of his life, botany.
Alpa Shah: India is not a safe place any more

Mar 22, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Gavin Jacobson

In March 1967, in the Indian village of Naxalbari, tucked in the foothills of the Himalayas, a revolutionary peasant organisation rebelled and forcibly seized land from landowners. Inspired by its actions, similar groups of “Naxalites” emerged across the country over the years that followed, with many strongholds located in the jungles and forests of central and eastern India. This was favourable terrain for guerrilla warfare.
Alpa Shah: India is not a safe place any more

Mar 22, 2024 | flipboard.com | Gavin Jacobson

Money (India)3 hours agoHex and the City: Crores flow via electoral bonds in Calcutta's cubbyholesThe Telegraph Online - Sambit Saha, Pinak Ghosh • 3hA small office at the end of the hallway in a dimly lit corner of an old decrepit building in central Calcutta doesn’t usually draw much attention.
The Salvo, vol. 6: India incarcerated

Mar 21, 2024 | thesalvo.substack.com | Gavin Jacobson

Welcome to the sixth edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: The anthropologist and award-winning author Alpa Shah on her new book, The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Indian Democracy. In March 1967, in the Indian village of Naxalbari, tucked in the foothills of the Himalayas, a revolutionary peasant organisation rebelled to forcibly seize land from landowners.
Thomas Piketty: "The Labour Party is too conservative"

Mar 15, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Gavin Jacobson

The reactionary author-turned-pornographer Michel Houellebecq is one of only two French thinkers whose work today receives any kind of significant attention outside l’Hexagone. This is a risible state of affairs for a country that has historically prided itself on its enviable production line of celebrity intellectuals. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a clothes rack in search of a war zone, only serves to heighten France’s cultural distress.
How Piketty found politics

Mar 14, 2024 | thesalvo.substack.com | Gavin Jacobson

Welcome to the fifth edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: I speak to the French economist Thomas Piketty. The author-turned-pornographer Michel Houellebecq is one of only two French thinkers whose work today receives any kind of significant attention outside l’Hexagone. This is a risible state of affairs for a country that has historically prided itself on its enviable production line of celebrity intellectuals.
The Salvo, vol. 4: American nightmare

Feb 28, 2024 | thesalvo.substack.com | Gavin Jacobson

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: Writers, missionaries, and militants. Essays should teem with ideas yet exult in their own shortcomings, never striving for completeness or resolution. For Adorno, the essay desires “not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal”. He put the point more succinctly: “The whole is the false”.
The Salvo, vol. 3: Liberalism's last laugh

Feb 22, 2024 | thesalvo.substack.com | Gavin Jacobson |Will Lloyd

Welcome to the third edition of The Salvo, your weekly newsletter about ideas from the New Statesman. This week: a book, a painting, and a joke. On the evening of 16 February, after my colleagues had left the NS office for the weekend, and while waiting for a contributor to file some late copy on the death of Alexei Navalny, I finished the most profound reading experience of my life so far. “In Naples we also have struggled against the flies. We have actually waged war against flies.