Reader's Digest: April 27, 2024

A very brief update with a highlight of my recent online reading: the excellent Susannah Clapp on pocket poverty in the LRB.

In Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Algonquin, £25), [Hannah] Carlson shows the ways in which pouches confer power: routinely sewn into male but not into female clothing, they have helped men make their way through the world, fully equipped, as if they were armoured vehicles or portable garden sheds.

Overstatement?—Not according to the paper of record:

In 1899 an article in the New York Times declared that, since the invention of pockets, ‘no pocketless person has ever been great.’