On Giving Up

According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many loser ...  عرض المزيد

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ...  عرض المزيد

‘Our history of giving up – that is to say, our attitude towards it, our obsession with it, our disavowal of its significance – may be a clue to something we should really call our histories and not our selves’, wrote Adam Phillips in a 2022 LRB piece, ‘On Giving Up’. Now develop ...  عرض المزيد

To give up or not to give up? The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is pr ...  عرض المزيد

Giving up can be painful. That's why we need to talk about it. Today: stories about glitchy apps, leaky paint cans, broken sculptures — and a quest for the perfect bowl of ramen. 

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