LENIN'S TOMB

God creates Adam and immediately—sooner than we thought—He speaks to him. This first address, according to the midrash, is a seduction:
“And the Lord God took the human and placed him in the Garden of Eden” (Gen. ‪2: 15):
He took him with beautiful words and seduced him to enter the Garden....

I.  Identity, in the modern sense, is necrological. It is an obituary notice. It overwrites us, in lapidary fashion, with the deposit of history. Here lies the subject: sex, race, class, nation. A list of attributes.
Given this, it is striking how little effort we put into historicising identity. As Marie Moran points out, prior to the Cold War, the term 'identity' tended to be used very little. Where it was used, it was only in its narrow philosophical sense, of...

Operation Sanctuary has uncovered, prosecuted and convicted members of another large child sex grooming ring, this time in Newcastle.
As is always the case when the majority of the perpetrators are not white, this has provoked a 'debate' about race, that vacillates between the hand-wringing and the downright sinister. Sarah Champion MPhas managed both, attacking the Tories from the...

I.  I'm in Iceland, watching bees feverishly court the foxgloves in the stinging cold.
They're working as though there weren't a billion tiny specks of rain drifting down on them like smoke. As though it really were summer.
And I am abruptly reminded of the need for this frantic labour. If the bees were to disappear as a species, humans will join them. Some say within four years. We will drop like bees, by the billions, famished....