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National Geographic
04-08-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
8 night sky events to see in August, from a ‘sturgeon moon' to a stunning 6-planet lineup
A near full 'sturgeon moon' rises behind The Shard in central London on August 20, 2024. The August full moon, named after seasonal sturgeon fishing traditions, is one of several major skywatching events this month. Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid, eyevine/Redux August is one of the best months of the year for stargazing in the Northern Hemisphere, thanks to warm nights and the famous Perseid meteor shower. Though the Perseids will be dampened by bright moonlight this year, you should still be able to see meteors if the skies are clear. But meteors aren't the only thing lighting up the heavens. This August, you can catch a rare six-planet lineup, a brilliant full moon, and one of the largest asteroids in our solar system glowing at peak brightness. Here's everything to look for in the skies above. The 'sturgeon moon'—August 9 The month's full 'sturgeon moon' occurs on the night of August 9. The nickname, popularized by the Farmer's Almanac, comes from the giant fish traditionally caught in late summer by Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region. Though the specific timing varies by location, the moon generally rises around sunset, glowing brightly throughout the night and setting after sunrise. That gives skywatchers plenty of time to observe the textured surface of the moon in detail through binoculars or telescopes. The Sturgeon Moon rises over Madrid's Cuatro Torres business district on August 1, 2023. The August full moon gets its name from Indigenous fishing traditions in the Great Lakes region of North America, when sturgeon were most abundant. Photograph by Javier Soriano, AFP/Getty Images One of the solar system's biggest asteroids, 2 Pallas, reaches peak brightness on the night of August 10. That's when the space rock reaches opposition—positioned directly opposite the sun in Earth's sky—making it visible all night long as it rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. Discovered in 1802, Pallas is our solar system's third-largest known asteroid by mass, with an average diameter of about 318 miles. It belongs to a group known as the 'big four,' which includes the dwarf planet Ceres. Although Pallas won't be visible to the naked eye, experienced stargazers with a telescope or high-powered binoculars might be able to spot it in the constellation Delphinus. Six planets march across the sky—around August 10 In the early morning hours around August 10, skywatchers can catch a stunning planetary parade: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will all appear in the sky at once. Mars, the lone outlier, will only be visible earlier in the evening. (Here's the best way to see a planetary alignment.) According to NASA, such 'planetary parades' are not very rare. In fact, we had one earlier this year. But they're commonly limited to four or five planets, making this six-planet show one to catch. Just note: Mercury may be hard to spot due to its proximity to the sun, and Uranus and Neptune will require a telescope. Perseid meteor shower peak—August 12–13 The Perseid meteor shower—one of the most reliable and beloved annual displays of shooting stars—is expected to peak overnight on August 12 into the morning of August 13. Under ideal dark-sky conditions, the Perseids can produce up to 100 meteors per hour. But this year, the waning gibbous moon will put a damper on the show. At 84 percent brightness, it could wash out more than three-quarters of the meteors, according to the American Meteor Society. Sheep graze under the northern lights near Hagermarsch, Germany, on August 13, 2024, as a Perseid meteor streaks across the sky. Photograph by Matthias Balk,On the morning of August 19, Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation—its farthest apparent distance from the sun in the sky, making it one of the best times this year to spot the elusive planet. Around the same time, Venus and Jupiter will also be visible, making it worth the effort to rise early this morning. In the early hours of August 21, a close approach of the crescent moon, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter will create a beautiful tableau in the predawn sky. The bright stars Castor, Pollux, and Procyon will join the display. This eye-catching grouping will be most visible during the hour before sunrise, low in the eastern sky. The Milky Way stretches across the sky from Cassiopeia to Cygnus and the Andromeda Galaxy appears above a 3000-year old bristlecone pine, California, August 9, 2016. Photograph by Babak Tafreshi, Nat Geo Image Collection A bright Perseid meteor streaks through a star-filled sky above Wizard Island in Oregon's famed Crater Lake. Photograph by John R. Foster, Science Photo Library The new moon on August 23 brings prime stargazing conditions, as the absence of moonlight allows for optimal viewing of distant galaxies, wispy nebulae, and even the last meteors from the Perseids. It's an excellent time to scan the Milky Way with binoculars or a telescope if you have dark enough skies. (A practical guide to stargazing.) Late August also marks the start of peak season for spotting the Andromeda galaxy, our closest neighbor, in the Northern Hemisphere. Without any light pollution from the moon, the galaxy can be seen with the naked eye. Just after sunset on August 26, look low in the western sky to spot the crescent moon cozying up to Mars, only about 2.5 degrees apart. Depending on your location, the pair may only be visible briefly around sunset, very low in the sky. Though Mars is currently dimmer than usual due to its orbital location, its red hue is still clearly visible to the naked eye. Stars shine over the sandstone cliffs of Meteora, Greece, on August 5, 2013. Photograph by Babak Tafreshi, Nat Geo Image Collection
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- General
- New Statesman
The endless variety of England's folk traditions
Photo by Tom Jamieson / New York Times / Redux / eyevine Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the collectors, the enthusiasts, who want to keep, save and preserve: 'Nequid pereat,' they might say, 'Let nothing perish.' Then there are the others, already on the phone to the skip-hire company. Lally MacBeth is firmly of the former persuasion. If you're of the latter, The Lost Folk might make you hyperventilate, so crammed is it with places, practices and stuff. The word 'save' appears many times. So indeed does the word 'skip', as in 'saved from a skip'. But persist, because you might see the culture of the UK in an unexpected light. MacBeth says 'Britain', but even in her introduction she apologises for the lack of coverage of the devolved nations; her book stays close to her home in south-west England. It's forgivable: we only have one lifetime and it would take several more to extend her project into the Celtic countries. Generation succeeds generation, and what she wants to save is their multifarious folk productions, old and new. Of folk, MacBeth gives a definition that widens as we go: she means the unofficial, hand-made and localised, the private collections and archives, the pageants and dances, the costumes and cakes. If not physically saved, then everything must at least be documented, and the means of recording archived too. She writes: 'We must use all means of recording to build a full picture of the customs, traditions, people and places of Britain, and we must work to preserve all methods of documentation.' This picture is not just of the past, not only tradition or lore, but of now and the future because 'folk' is happening, arising and emerging everywhere. In MacBeth's mind, her own predecessors now need saving. 'The Lost People' she calls them, meaning the early folklorists and folk collectors. Many have fallen from view, especially the women. Cecil Sharp, active at the turn of the 20th century, remains well known as the 'collector of folk song and reinventor of Morris dancing'. But despite being 'tireless', Sharp managed, in McBeth's opinion, to 'write women and people of colour out of his work… creating a folk that suited him: sanitised, classist, racist and very, very male'. To counteract that, MacBeth introduces us to an alternative roster of folk-collectors, often female. From Victorian days into the mid-20th century, there were women who travelled about gathering recipes, stories, costumes, tools and 'country ways' just as these were dying out, and whose notebooks and collections were often dispersed or destroyed when they died. It sounds harmless but collecting was not without tensions: it could get competitive and, as MacBeth again notes, classist, with one social class (usually the upper-middle) making judgements about what was worth saving from among the productions of the lower orders. The invention of recording equipment was revolutionary, with people's voices and dialects also able to be saved, as well as their tales and tools. There was, for example, Dorothy Hartley, born in 1893 in Yorkshire. Hartley cycled around collecting and interviewing and sketching. Thanks to her we know how to thatch a haystack, or bake bread in a brick oven. Others collected objects. Eva and Edward Pinto of Middlesex favoured 'wooden bygones': butter pats, mangles, hand-made boxes, toy animals and the like. They created a collection which soon outgrew their house, spilling into sheds and chalets and mocked up shops, which the public could view. Yet others were more nautically minded. In Gravesend, in a building fitted out like a ship, Sydney 'Long John Silver' Cumbers amassed a huge number of ships' figureheads. Cumbers sported an eyepatch, cigarette holder and yachting cap when he showed visitors around. MacBeth's embrace even includes 'living' collections – or what photos and notes now remain. Upon retiring in the 1940s, the Welsh miner David Davis turned his hand to topiary, creating in his garden a 'mystical paradise' of tableaux, mostly biblical: there were bushes cut to look like angels, and a hedge shaped like the Last Supper. Many came to see it. One might ask: was it art? To which the author would reply – it was certainly folk. 'If it's by the people, for the people, it is 'folk'.' Therefore, she welcomes the local parades and festivities up and down the land as folk. Hastings has an annual Jack in the Green festival as part of May Day, with Morris dancers, giants, milkmaids and choirs. There is Lewes's famous effigy burning. Penzance now has its mid-winter Moltol. Since 2017, Toxteth has held its own Day of the Dead, no less folk for being a modern introduction, and hardly traditional. Indeed, when it comes to tradition, there existed what MacBeth calls 'uncomfortable folk practice'. In Morris dancing, once the preserve of men, gender roles are now being contested. Molly dancing used to refer to men dressed as women, but today there are women's teams (or 'sides') of Molly dancers. In Bristol, the term has been reclaimed by a group called Molly No Mates, a 'queer drag Molly dancing team'. Some traditional Morris dances involved blackface, but in 2020, the Joint Morris Organisation agreed to ban the practice. 'It was a monumental moment in the history of Morris dancing,' says MacBeth. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Pageants and galas are one thing, but what astonishes is the folk-stuff: the gloves and garlands, horse brasses and love spoons, pub signs and special cakes, the button badges, corn dollies, and 'obby 'osses. And it is everywhere, especially in pubs – and also in churches, where there are church kneelers, a special passion of MacBeth's. These are women's work, often embroidered to depict local scenes or stories. But the question keeps arising: if all must be saved – or at the very least recorded – what should be done with it? And where should it be kept? And who decides what goes where? 'Where people collect together of their own volition, there is folk, and it is not for collectors to judge the ways in which this happens or how the objects are made.' When decisions are made – when official museum curators judge that something should be brought in from the wild – it can be political. Take Sydney Cumbers' collection of figureheads: in 1953, he donated them to the Cutty Sark, where they are now displayed. MacBeth believes the fact that his collection was accepted 'was due in no small part to his… standing as a white male'. In contrast, there have been several efforts to establish an official museum of Romany culture, assembled from private collections, but all have floundered. The book itself is a veritable trove. There is no index. Perhaps appropriately, one has to rummage. MacBeth herself spends a lot of time in junk shops, on Ebay, or in county archives, searching for photos and newspaper reports, noting and saving. Folk, she says, is what gives us a sense of place and belonging. Perhaps she's right about that – and perhaps folk is what will save us from the samey-ness of our high streets, the soullessness of our new-build housing estates. It might be a council-sponsored pirate parade, or even – ye gods – a knitted post-box topper. If it's a real, of-the-people creation or event, she says, it's worth recording, worth getting involved. We just have to alert ourselves to its existence. And cancel the skip. Kathleen Jamie's books include 'Cairn' (Sort of Books) The Lost Folk: From the Forgotten Past to the Emerging Future of Folk Lally MacBeth Faber & Faber, 352pp, £20 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Jacinda Ardern's unexamined life] Related
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Ro Khanna: American optimist
Photo by Stephen Voss / Redux / eyevine The Phillies baseball team was one run up in the sixth inning when the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna gazed at the crowd, turned to me and said: 'I'm American. Americans are optimistic.' Nihilism, cynicism and fascism are buzzwords in America today. Optimism, less so. But people did look happy. Families knocked their heads together for selfies, squinting through the sunlight at their phones. Young bros munched hotdogs with one hand and slurped Miller Lites with the other. Predictions of the death of the republic felt far away. For a moment, Saul Bellow seemed to have got it wrong when he wrote, 'The human species as a whole has gone into politics.' The Phillie Phanatic, the team's green, fluffy mascot, the most eminent in America, got off his quad bike, climbed a wall ten feet in front of us and began vigorously humping the air. I suggested the country might be a bit stuck, spiritually. 'I have perfect confidence in the American spiritual purpose,' the representative for Silicon Valley dutifully replied. 'It's the political class that hasn't been worthy of the American people.' He looked around the stadium again. 'Do people seem like they're in a dark place? They seem like they're in a good place here.' Khanna's optimism runs deeper than baseball crowds. Where other Democrats think we live in an irredeemably populist age and dismiss voters as indulging demagoguery, he sees an enduring belief in democracy. 'People underestimate the spirit, the democratic spirit, and the resilience of our people,' he continued. 'Martin Luther King did not decry the spirituality of the American people. He summoned it. Obama didn't decry it. Kennedy didn't decry it. Leadership is about finding the register to tap in to it.' Khanna, 48, has been in Congress since 2016 and co-chaired Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. He has become the leading Democrat opposed to Trump's campaign in Iran and has co-led a War Powers Resolution, which instructs the president to withdraw unauthorised forces acting against Iran. Like the Maga isolationists, he wants to avoid another Iraq. In 2004, aged 27, he ran against a Democratic congressman who supported Bush's war. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'I'm not a pacifist,' Khanna told me on the phone last week. 'I don't believe in foreign interventions that are going to make matters worse.' He wants the Democrats to be the party that 'stands for peace abroad and good jobs at home – we need to retake the mantle of being the anti-war party that Donald Trump took from us. We need to stand united again.' Khanna perches on the party's progressive wing, but skirts around its trademark social justice rhetoric. He avoids questions about whether he'll run for the 2028 presidency. But ignore that: the signs suggest he will. He's a constant presence on television and takes pride in often appearing on Fox. As early as March 2022, Sanders' top aides were telling Khanna to run in 2024 if Joe Biden stood down. A year later, the New York Times reported that he was already being talked about as a candidate for 2028. Last year, the Atlantic said that Khanna refused to rule out a run. 'The old guard needs to go' he told me, in his professional, studious manner. The implication was obvious: it's time for his generation to lead. A few weeks earlier in north DC, Khanna strolled into a coffee shop with a chai tea. He was wearing a blue tie with a fat Trumpian knot, a congressional pin, and shiny hair gel. He had an impassive air, a rarity in agitated Washington. He thought his party was 'very self-flagellating and introspective for two months' after the election. But now the listing economy meant the president had 'committed the cardinal sin in American politics: you can't destroy wealth. You can't go after people's money.' He's 'optimistic' the Democrats will win come 2028. Khanna thinks the party hasn't had a truly open primary since Barack Obama ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008. Who are his would-be competitors for the Democratic nomination this cycle? Apart from Kamala Harris, who is slowly rising from her political grave to attend fundraisers, and Chris Murphy, Trump's bête noire in the Senate, the field is packed with governors. There's California's Gavin Newsom, who has launched a podcast in which he banters with leading Maga figures. The Illinois billionaire and long-time Democrat donor JB Pritzker is being touted by old party hands in Washington. Harris's 2024 running mate, Tim Walz, is keeping up his public appearances. Bringing up the rear is Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro. But the only energy in the party since the election has been on Bernie Sanders' anti-oligarchy tour, featuring his support act, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another frontrunner. At a stop in Pennsylvania in May, a union leader introduced Sanders with the line: 'No other politician is able to do it like him.' Which, given that he is 83, is part of the problem. 'The two most consequential Democrats in the modern era [are] Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders,' Khanna said. Khanna's politics are a mix of Sanders and Obama. His Obama-esque brand of optimism makes Sanders' progressive policies sound less radical to the establishment. Is he Bernie's heir? 'No, that would be highly presumptuous. Bernie Sanders is not cloneable. Great leaders like Bernie or Obama have no heirs. Who's Winston Churchill's heir? Who's Gandhi's heir?' At the game, we were sitting four rows behind first base. Khanna and his younger brother, an urbane federal attorney, were to my left, with their parents to my right. The brothers were trading notes on whether the pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates was the best in the league. Their mother leaned over and mischievously said baseball had got better once the rules were changed to shorten the time between pitches. She and their father – an aloof, dignified man who prefers cricket – raised the boys in nearby Bucks County, and would bring them to a game once a year. 'They'd get all the food!' she reminisced. Nowadays, the family obliges when Khanna shepherds them pitch-side in freshly bought Phillies hats to take a photo for social media. [See also: Oliver Eagleton: Imperial calculations] Khanna's parents came over from the Punjab in 1968. His maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, spent time in prison for supporting civil disobedience during Ghandi's campaign for India's independence from British rule. He went on to become an MP and lead the Punjabi branch of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. 'He was my inspiration,' Khanna said. 'He really stood for the ideals of non-violence, pluralism, self-determination.' What does he take from his grandfather's story? 'The importance of courage in politics, the importance of a willingness to stand up for what you believe.' That Martin Luther King drew deeply from Gandhi's satyagraha philosophy means the American civil rights leader looms large in Khanna's politics. 'In his book on non-violence King said that we must be angry and reform a system – not obsess over the players in the system.' For Khanna, King is the bridge between the seemingly disparate worlds of the Punjab and the United States, between the activism his grandfather championed and the country Khanna now wants to lead. The morning of the baseball game, Khanna was on ABC News telling his fellow Democrats to admit they were wrong to let a senile 81-year-old run for president. In our seats, he flicked through emails on his phone, triaging the fall-out. The party is still writhing over its part in Trump's comeback. Khanna thinks voters can only trust the Democrats again once they own up to that mistake. His politics, too, cuts against the party's progressive grain. He pushes what he's light-heartedly called 'Blue Maga', a coinage ill-suited for a Democrat popularity contest. Ditto the fact that the Maga guru Steve Bannon told me Khanna is one of his favourite Democrats. Whatever the optics, Khanna wants to beat Trump by spreading the bounty of economic growth. His main idea – what he calls economic patriotism – is to reindustrialise the US with a Marshall Plan for America. He wants Medicare for all. He fights for more taxes on the wealthy, getting big money out of politics and a higher minimum wage. But he is no Luddite: he sees technology as America's saviour. At Yale Law School in the late 1990s Professor Lawrence Lessig told him all the interesting law would be in Silicon Valley. He heeded the advice, joined a firm and represented 'tech start-ups, tech companies, venture capital'. He got the call from the Obama administration in 2009 to become a deputy assistant secretary in the Commerce Department. Elon Musk called him a 'leading thinker' for a blurb quote for his 2012 book Entrepreneurial Nation. And then, after a few false starts, he was elected to the House of Representatives for California's 17th Congressional District, located in Silicon Valley, in 2016. Venture capitalists backed Khanna's run, and so his call for wealth taxes presents a puzzle: why did capital's traffic wardens support this union-backing progressive? 'They still support me,' he said, 'because I'm pro-innovation.' 'They believe I'm a technology optimist, and I believe that technology has to be part of the solution of the American renewal.' Technology itself, in Khanna's world, sits on a different moral plane to those technologists who use 'their wealth to distort politics'. 'I'm very opposed to this vision that innovation is incompatible with democracy.' Khanna is intensely relaxed about artificial intelligence. He thinks robots will replace workers at a slower rate than the doomsters suggest. 'We need to have strong labour protection, so there's collective bargaining, so workers get to decide and control machines, not be displaced by machines.' Again, something for both the technologists and the progressives. Compare that language to a recent tweet from Sanders: 'AI is coming for YOUR job.' Khanna's ecumenical approach to politics means he shuns this populist division of us and them – and yet retains the policy. Labour protections are fine. But what if workers aren't around to feel the benefits of a trade union? Might AI be a meteor that wipes us out? 'No, no, it's like any technology: we need to have a humanistic frame for it.' There's a proprietary pride in the way Khanna touts the supremacy of Silicon Valley. It's an area in which his 'progressive capitalism' fuses with his conviction that America is exceptional and unique. His usually decorous tone takes on a nationalistic pitch. 'The EU has no credibility [on tech],' he said. 'They haven't produced a single consequential tech company other than [the Dutch supplier for semiconductors] ASML,' he said. 'America will lead. America will make a decision. We have failed in having the proper sense of regulation. But people laugh at the EU's regulations because it'd be like if I tried to regulate [American] football, never having played football.' And what of that famed 'special relationship' with the UK? Does the UK have any standing on technology? 'It's a yawn. I care more about what some random congressperson thought about AI than when Rishi Sunak said he was going to do an AI summit. I kind of laughed.' And why is that? 'Because it'd be like if I said I wanted to do a summit of what it's like to live in the developing world. It's like, what the hell do you know about what's going on about innovation and technology?' The UK does have a trillion-dollar tech industry, I pointed out. 'I have a $14trn tech district,' Khanna replied. His thoughts on Sunak were delivered with brevity: 'Fine. Technocrat. Proud of his story.' Khanna sees little resemblance between himself and Sunak because his newly minted Silicon Valley neighbour (Sunak's now a fellow at Stanford) lacks a 'humanistic side'. 'I mean, I'm proud of him as someone who overcame being Indian and Hindu and was proud of his whole heritage, but I think it was not transformational an ideology. I respect him on a personal basis.' Forget Sunak. There's another young politician in Washington who courts Big Tech and preaches reindustrialisation, who can thrive in the Valley and the Rust Belt – and who hopes one day to lead their party. Khanna at a Bernie Sanders rally in San Francisco, March 2024. Photo by Nick Otto for the Washington Post In February, JD Vance defended an employee on Musk's cost-cutting team who had once tweeted, 'You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,' and, 'Normalise Indian hate.' Khanna took issue with that, and tweeted at Vance: 'Are you going to tell him to apologise for saying 'Normalise Indian hate' before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.' Vance, whose wife's parents are also Indian immigrants, replied: 'For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up… You know what I do worry about, Ro? That they'll grow up to be a US Congressmen [sic] who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid's social media posts. You disgust me.' Internet spats are one way in which Khanna has made himself the Democrats' loudest critic of the vice-president. On 5 May, Khanna gave a speech, pointedly at their shared alma mater Yale Law School, in which he criticised Vance for the administration's attacks on free speech and universities, calling the vice-president's time at Yale a 'stain on the degree of every Yale graduate'. Though Khanna comes from an immigrant family, and Vance from a broken one, they have similar careers. 'But very different values,' Khanna said. 'I'm not for getting rid of due process. I believe that our multi-racial democracy is a strength, not a weakness.' In his convention speech last year, Vance argued that America is not an idea, but a nation state, a group of people living between two oceans, whose interests come above those ideals debated in Independence Hall – where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were signed – three miles from the stadium. 'It is a nation state,' Khanna said, but 'we also have the dedication to the idea, where we're conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition of equality.' Vance is 'making us less exceptional' he added. 'He's making us another ordinary nation.' He worries America might become a place where humans are ordinary, not one where their brutishness is alloyed with a higher purpose. '[Trump and Vance] made America so much about transaction and survival of the jungle and doing what's in your self-interest, or you're a sucker and you're weak. And that's a very impoverished vision of America. That's every other nation. 'What makes America the spark of vitality, of inspiration is that we seek to ennoble that. We seek to inspire beyond that. That's our exceptional nature.' American exceptionalism is not in vogue much nowadays. Large factions of the left and right see American imperialism as a sinful enterprise. In many ways, they think it's time the US became more like every other nation. Might Trump be the archetypal American leader, the apogee of… 'the American id,' Khanna jumped in. 'Kennedy or Obama is the embodiment of the American ideal.' We walked up the stadium steps after the game and Khanna asked me to sum up his perspective in two sentences. 'Progressivism mixed with American exceptionalism,' I offered. 'American progressivism,' he said, smiling, 'I'd never thought about it like that before.' We drove 40 minutes north to a village hall in Bucks County, the part of Pennsylvania where Khanna grew up. The changeable sign on the lawn outside read: 'MEI CATERING BUCKS BEST WEDDING – 215 364 2130'. Inside, around 100 people sat beneath leftover wedding decorations. One organiser told me the local Republican representative, Brian Fitzpatrick, has not held in-person town halls for the district in years. On the stage, Khanna promised to stay until all their questions were answered. (When I left, he was fielding questions by the stage.) The first questioner told Khanna he should call Trump voters 'white supremacists'. Khanna demurred. He would never label half the country like that. These are fellow Americans, endowed with exceptionalism. He doesn't believe it, anyway. Three other questioners (at least one a self-identifying millennial) were worried about the party's language and messaging: 'We need to stop using this weak language – this is Nazi crap. This is eugenics.' I spied two surgical masks in the room. Khanna said Trump voters do not like what the president is doing and can be won over. 'That's because they're stupid,' one woman muttered behind me. Noticeably, he did not mention trans people in one of his answers: 'gay, lesbian…' he paused, listing those under threat from the administration. 'Trans!' an audience member shouted out. '… or whatever your sexuality,' Khanna continued. He strangely still thinks 'woke' only means respecting minorities' history but his condemnation of cancel culture to me (he called himself a 'free-speech absolutist') suggests he knows the political toll wokeness has taken on the Democratic Party. The night before, Khanna got talking to Trump voters who were protesting outside his town hall in Allentown. They had recognised him from his appearances on Fox News. Khanna invited them in to listen to his speech. When he said he was trying to pass a bill supporting Trump's plan to lower prescription drugs, 'they clapped. I talked about not cutting Medicaid. They clapped. They love the economic patriotism of building new industry and how we're going to build manufacturing. And this is what we need to do: engage these Trump supporters.' Ro Khanna is an American optimist. In one sense, he pans Trumpland sewage for nuggets of hope. In another, he sees through crises to an irrepressible American spirit. Trump's marauding power cannot crush his conviction that democracy will endure. He has no time for the idea that politicians have become sad stars in a reality television show. He once said Trump will be a footnote in American history. That seems complacent, even innocent. But Khanna's Sanders-esque policies lend his politics of optimism an edge of reality, a confidence to turn and face the reasons we live in a Trumpian age. [See also: Labour is losing its mind] Related
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Giorgia Meloni's selective memory
Photo by Gianni Cipriano/The New York Times / Redux / eyevine Twice, in Donald Trump Jr's foreword to the new English translation of Giorgia Meloni's memoir, the businessman and Apprentice judge dwells on her 'working-class' background. Long before Meloni became the Italian prime minister, he tells us, she was a 'young working-class woman with a deep love and vision for her nation'; this autobiography tells of her rise from a 'working-class Roman neighbourhood' to government. Trump Jr – son of a billionaire US president – clearly feels well placed to credit Meloni's closeness to the underdog, squeezing two mentions of her working-class credentials into his slender 268-word preface. I Am Giorgia asserts Meloni's ordinariness as a Christian, a mother, and an Italian. It is not rare for politicians to boast about the challenges they have overcome and even their parents' blue-collar jobs. But what makes Meloni working class? She tells of how she began life in Rome's 'well-heeled' Camilluccia district, albeit in a family immediately ripped apart by the exit of her father who ran away to the Canary Islands. Further disaster hit, Meloni reports, when she and her sister accidentally destroyed the family home in a fire, forcing them 'out on the street' – or at least, prompting her mother to buy a different apartment, in the capital's Garbatella district. Conceived in the 1920s as a 'garden city' for Rome's working-class population, during Meloni's childhood much of Garbatella's social housing stock was being sold off to new owner-occupiers. Her father's absence left its mark on the young Meloni; she also tells of being bullied as a child. The mix of abandonment and victimisation sets up a story of perseverance against the odds, also dramatising her defiance against schoolteachers who scolded her early right-wing views. The fact that Meloni never went to university (she attended a hospitality training college) also surely sets her apart from many politicians. Yet clichés about growing up in 'gritty' streets are misplaced. Several Italian responses to this book highlighted that Meloni's parents owned stakes in multiple businesses, while an investigation by the Domani newspaper alleged that her claims about the scale of the housefire were strongly exaggerated. What of Trump Jr's claim that she has become 'one of the most significant political figures in the world', heralding a 'worldwide conservative revolution' against 'globalist elites'? I Am Giorgia appeared in Italian in May 2021, and soon became a top-selling pamphlet for the politician who led the opposition to Mario Draghi's cross-party government. Since then, she has continued to rise, both mobilising protest votes in the 2022 Italian election and maintaining right-wing dominance ever since. Her success in uniting traditional conservatives and her own more radical political tradition has become something of a model internationally. This English translation, issued by Skyhorse – a US publisher whose website landing page is dominated by the face of Robert F Kennedy – adds no new material on her time in office. The editors of I Am Giorgia have made few obvious interventions, and allusions to her party's neofascist heritage – notably her repeated praise for Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) co-founder Giorgio Almirante – appear without further clarification. It would have been easy enough to muster a footnote to detail the nature of the MSI: though given that Almirante called his party the home of 'fascists in a democracy' up until his death in 1988, perhaps this would not have cast his political heir Meloni in a positive light. In I Am Giorgia, Meloni adopts the tone of an outsider, painting conservative values as the victim of an all-consuming elite disdain. Even Silvio Berlusconi's political dominance in the 1990s and 2000s – during which she herself became a minister aged just 31 – does not trouble this account. Instead, we get stories of MSI members who were killed in the political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s, when, according to Meloni, right-wingers were 'criminalised'. Liberal hegemony is painted as an 'intangible dictatorship' working to destroy national culture: 'the mass deportations of the Soviet era have been replaced by policies supporting immigration'. Conservatives are underdogs because they are resisting a ubiquitous progressive orthodoxy. Indeed, to define oneself as right-wing means exclusion 'from the circles of the elites, from the radical-chic salons that Italy is filled with'. When the Italian edition of the book was published, Meloni's party was in opposition; today, if she is fighting 'elites' at all, she is doing so at G7 summits and Nato meet-ups. Those she calls 'elites' are defined less by wealth or political authority than by their attitudes, especially on immigration, national identity, and the nuclear family. Tellingly, this book is also endorsed not just by the US president's son but also by the world's richest man. Elon Musk has been a great admirer of Meloni's focus on falling birthrates in Western countries, and this book leans heavily into this theme. She likewise casts her stance against 'unregulated' immigration as a defence of the weakest in society, from immigrants encouraged to risk their lives at sea, to the working-class Italians she deems 'most vulnerable' to competition for jobs and public services. Globalists use immigration as a 'tool to erode national identity' but the state can accept 'compatible immigration', especially by Christians or those with even distant Italian heritage. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Some of Meloni's admirers in the press tell a reassuring story about how a once-populist politician has been tempered by the demands of office. Yet this book, originally published 16 months before her election win, complicates such a narrative. Well before she became premier, Meloni's party had combined heated rhetoric about identity with pro-business economics and a commitment to the major Western institutions. Accounts of Meloni's pragmatic moderation since 2022 routinely cite her support for Ukraine, or her abjuring of any Ital-exit from the EU. Yet these positions were baked in years before she took office, and the harsher rhetoric about the EU in this book is time and again tempered by an insistence on the need for a united Europe, 'rooted in civilisation and identity'. If Meloni has not abandoned 'populist' notes, this is perhaps because her harsh condemnation of progressive 'totalitarianism' is not matched with truly radical alternatives of her own. Hence even in last June's EU election, her party's manifesto warned against a 'superstate reminiscent of the… Soviet model' and instead vaguely proposed a 'Europe of peoples and nations'. In truth her approach to EU politics has sought cooperation, not least as Italy has been the main recipient of post-pandemic EU funds. Meloni's prominence in the EU since 2022 has been remarkable: in part the product of weak leaders in Paris and Berlin, but also of other countries' politics becoming rather more like Italy's own. The likes of Marine Le Pen's National Rally or Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom increasingly follow a 'Melonian' path of seeking to reorder Europe from within rather than just rebel against it. On immigration, on fossil fuels, and even on military spending, the EU is ever less of an enemy for Meloni's party. Her government can today even boast of its role as a 'bridge' between Brussels and the Maga camp in Washington. Still, even if Trump Jr or his father are ideological admirers of Meloni, the US president's erratic foreign policy and line on tariffs are also potential points of friction. Meloni has brought her part of the Italian right into the heart of the Euro-Atlantic institutions. Trump's moves to shake up these same institutions from above could still cause problems for her. But otherwise, if this is a 'worldwide conservative revolution', it continues apace. I Am Giorgia: My Roots, My Principles Giorgia Meloni Skyhorse, 288pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Keir Starmer faces war on all fronts] Related
National Geographic
28-05-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
9 celestial events this June's, from a strawberry moon to interstellar clouds
The Milky Way and its core region in constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, as seen from Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. Composite Photograph by Alan Dyer, VW Pics/Science Photo Library Whether you're waking up early to spot Venus in the pre-dawn sky, staying up late to peep the Lagoon Nebula, or spending the whole night on the hunt for meteors, June's night sky has something for every stargazer. Here's what to keep an eye out for when you look up this month. (9 must-see night sky events to look forward to in 2025.) Venus at greatest western elongation—June 1 On June 1, Venus will reach its farthest distance west of the sun from the perspective of Earth—a point known as greatest western elongation. This is a particularly good time to get a glimpse at Earth's neighboring planet, as it won't be drowned out by sunlight. In some time zones, the exact timing of this event occurs on May 31, while in others, it's on June 1. But the best time to view Venus is just before dawn, when it rises in the eastern sky in the Northern Hemisphere, or the northeastern sky if you're in the Southern Hemisphere. A "well-placed" globular cluster—June 2 Missed seeing the "well-placed" globular clusters in May? The Great Hercules Cluster, or Messier 13, reaches its highest point in the night sky on June 2, putting it in a prime viewing position. Discovered in 1714 by English astronomer Edmond Halley, for whom the iconic Halley's Comet is named, the Great Hercules Cluster is a collection of more than 100,000 stars densely packed into a glittering, spheroidic shape. While it can be hard to discern with the naked eye, it's easily visible through binoculars. Daytime Arietids meteor shower peak—June 7 As its name implies, the prolific daytime Arietid meteor shower doesn't peak at night, but during the day. That, of course, makes most of the meteors nearly impossible to see. But there's still a chance of spotting shooting stars in the predawn hours on June 7, just before the estimated peak during the daylight hours. And if you want to "see" the daytime activity, visit the NASA Meteor Shower Portal and look for colored dots—those indicate meteors associated with the active meteor shower. The June full moon, known as the Strawberry Moon, rises over St Paul's Cathedral and The Shard in central London on June 22, 2024. Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid, eyevine/Redux The full Strawberry Moon rises behind the Empire State Building in New York City on June 21, 2024. Photograph by Gary Hershorn, Getty Images This month's full moon, known as the "Strawberry Moon," won't take on the red hue of its namesake fruit, but it is lovely nonetheless. The nickname, popularized by the Farmers' Almanac, is derived from Indigenous traditions in North America that link full moons to annual harvesting and hunting events. In June, that's the ripening of wild strawberries. (Learn about the lunar cycle and the origins of each month's full moon name.) Old European nicknames for the June full moon include the Mead or Honey Moon. According to NASA, this might be tied to the honey harvesting that happens during this month—and it could be the inspiration for the modern honeymoon, as ancient traditions called for June weddings. Mars and Regulus meet, and a "well-placed" Butterfly Cluster—June 16 Mars and the bright star Regulus—known for its colorful twinkling—will have a close encounter on June 16, with peak viewing occurring around 90 minutes after sunset. Regulus is a four-star system, as opposed to a single star, but only three of those four individual stars will be visible during this event through the eye of a telescope. Then, around midnight, the Butterfly Cluster will be "well-placed" in the night sky, reaching its highest point above the horizon. To see this butterfly-shaped open cluster of stars, grab a pair of binoculars. The summer Milky Way filling the night sky at Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada. The pink glow of the Lagoon Nebula can be seen above the horizon, in the Milky Way galaxy's core. Composite Photograph by Alan Dyer, VW Pics/UIG/Getty Images Star clusters aren't the only "well-placed" celestial objects this month. The Lagoon Nebula, or Messier 8, is a swirling cloud of interstellar gas where stars are born, located some 5,200 light years away. It reaches its highest point in the night sky around midnight on June 22. From mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, the Lagoon Nebula can sometimes be seen with the naked eye under ideal viewing conditions. Otherwise, binoculars or a telescope is the best way to spot them. Prime stargazing conditions—June 25 On this night, there's a new moon lunar cycle, which means the sky will be plenty dark for stargazing. While brighter celestial objects like planets and stars are typically visible through the moon's light pollution, dimmer ones like distant galaxies and nebulae will be easier to see during the new moon, particularly through a telescope. (These are the best stargazing sites in North America.) If you're a photographer, this is the perfect time to try your hand at astrophotography. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way's galactic core rises high in the night sky throughout the summer, making it a prime focal point. A Bootid meteor seen photographed in June 2018. Photograph by Steve Dudrow, Getty Images The Bootids are a notoriously variable meteor shower, producing astonishing displays of hundreds of shooting stars some years, and just a few other years. If you're willing to try your luck, the meteor shower is expected to peak on June 27. And luck is already on your side—the moon will be barely illuminated as a waxing crescent, so it won't impede your view of fainter shooting stars. Close approach of the moon and Mars—June 30 To close out the month, the waxing crescent moon and Mars will put on a little show. Our celestial neighbors will pass within 1°16' of each other; if you hold your arm out fully toward the moon and stick your pinky finger up, your finger's width is about the distance between the pair, so you'll be able to see them simultaneously through binoculars. Keep an eye out for the "earthshine" phenomenon, where light reflected from Earth makes the unlit part of the crescent moon glow faintly. This most commonly happens just after sunset or right before sunrise.
