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Fans of justice, who’ve been given a battering over the last, say, 30 years, got a small peek into a better world this week when the National Portrait Gallery in London turned down a donation of 1.3 Million dollars from the  Sackler Trust. Britain is saturated in Sackler beneficiaries, from the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (I like to think that the devil crawled into that name, sticking his forked tongue out of Serpentine) to the V&A Museum Sackler entrance, they have slathered their tax deductible trust money on the art world to an incredible extent, creating a huge ethical dump. Up in Scotland, a Labour and a Scottish National politician both urged the Dundee branch of the V&A Museum to return a grant of 650,000 buckos, to which V&A returned the time-honored non-response that they’ve taken Sackler money before, as has everybody. This is known as the junkie defense. Appropriate, eh? In other news, Dame Theresa Sackler (about the Dame, no comment) has been served with a 50

Adam is learning to read – and, more impressively, reading in English and in French. Because he likes books and comics so much, this is something that is driven forward not so much by school – his mathematics is being driven forward by school – as by his long established desire to read by himself, out of shouting distance from his monitoring parents. Now, we love this, up to a point. On the other hand, this desire to read and write is also enmeshed in Adam’s Goth side. Adam sometimes makes remarks about horror movies (which he hasn’t seen) in a familiar tone before other adults, and we have to explain that he hasn’t seen these movies – really, are we letting our six year old watch Jason in Halloween? – but that he has caught the drift that these movies are out there. Like other kids, Adam is very obsessed by series, by collections. To have cards for all the players on your favorite football team, or to have all the Goosebumps series of books, or to watch all episodes of the Pink Pan

This spring,  the rightwing French journal,  Commentaire ,   published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nart, a former officer with the DST, French Counter-intelligence.  Commentaire , in the past, had published articles in praise of Kojève and even articles by Kojève. Kojève, after WWII, declared himself a “Sunday philosopher”, and had proceeded to devote most of his time to reconstructing France’s economy as an subminister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this post, Kojève became one of the great behind-the-scenes architects of France’s  thirty glorious years , that experiment in  dirigiste  capitalism under the Bretton Woods system which finally came a header in the period of rampant inflation and the Oil crisis of the seventies. Notably, he helping to lay the foundation of the Common Market. Nart’s article was entitled, ominously,  Alexandre Kojevnikov dit Kojève . Scholars of the great Cold War Communist hunts will be delighted to learn that the ol