Benedict Anderson: Riddles of Yellow and Red
The bitter oppositions of Thai politics can seem strangely lacking in ideological substance. How might they be explained? In one of his last lectures, Benedict Anderson considers a crucial but overlooked factor: divisions within the country’s Sino-Thai communities.
Mike Davis: The Coming Desert
Episodes from the history of climate science, where discoveries of secular planetary variation—ice ages, desiccation—have always alternated with emphases on human depredation. Mike Davis draws back the curtain on the landmark contribution of the great anarchist geographer Pyotr Kropotkin, penned from a Tsarist prison.
Stathis Kouvelakis: Syriza's Rise and Fall
Why did the Tsipras government sign up to a third Memorandum, within days of the massive popular rejection of austerity in the July 2015 referendum? Stathis Kouvelakis tracks Syriza’s repositioning since 2012 and its self-imprisonment inside the single-currency regime.
Alberto Toscano: A Structuralism of Feeling?
Frédéric Lordon’s work combines an elite business-school training with a radical Regulation Theory background, highly effective polemics against the hardening economic and neo-imperial orders in France and the Eurozone with an ambitious social-philosophical agenda. Alberto Toscano investigates.
Fredric Jameson: Gherman's Anti-Aesthetic
Recent films of the Soviet-trained director Aleksei Gherman read as enigmatic late-modern outcrops—or meteorites from an unimaginable future—resistant to the all-pervasive aestheticization processes of consumer capitalism.
Sanjay Reddy, Rahul Lahoti: $1.90 a Day: What Does It Say?
The World Bank claims global poverty will soon fall below 10 per cent, but do its figures deserve their international legitimacy? Sanjay Reddy and Rahul Lahoti probe the assumptions and methodologies on which the Bank’s assertions are based, and suggest an alternative.
Adam Tooze: Just Another Panic?
Adam Tooze on Ben Bernanke, The Courage to Act. Self-serving insider account of the financial crisis by the former Federal Reserve chair.
Rebecca Karl: Little Big Man
Rebecca Karl on Alexander Pantsov & Steven Levine, Deng Xiaoping. Formation and modus operandi of the Number Two Capitalist Roader.
Gregor McLennan: Quiddity and Flux
Gregor McLennan on Haim Hazan, Against Hybridity. A gerontologist opposes irreducibly opaque realities to capitalist logics of blending in.