The Salvo

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.