Two years after an electoral landslide swept him into Number Ten, Keir Starmer has been ousted by his own MPs, as Andrew Burnham becomes the UK’s sixth prime minister since Brexit. Analysis of the causes—political, economic, ideological, social—behind Westminster’s latest coup.
As globalization stalls, what possibilities might national-economic policy open up for the left? Benjamin Kunkel weighs the claims of its Marxist, Polanyian and psychoanalytic interpreters, asking whether the re-politicization of the economy might be joined to a renewed internationalism, adequate to ecological crisis.
China’s dizzying modernization, concurrent with the advent of the online world, has found cultural expression in a starburst of new modes and forms, from avant-garde literature to users’ video posts, role-playing games and made-for-smartphone micro-dramas. Against diagnoses of ‘brain-rot’, Mao Jian detects a new sense of agency in their embrace of ‘going dark’.
The death of Carlo Ginzburg in Bologna this June has robbed intellectual history of one of its most original practitioners. Perry Anderson, a colleague and friend, introduces the first of a two-part selection of exchanges between them, ranging across politics, war, religion, philology, history.
Mario del Pero on Anders Stephanson, American Imperatives. Critical reflections on the Cold War as a strategy of US power-projection, from its preeminent historiographical iconoclast.
Ilya Budraitskis on Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. Compelling account of the friendship networks of 1960s Russian human-rights activists, singled out from the more heterogeneous world of late-Soviet opposition.
Julian Stallabrass on Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine. An American artist documents and explores the arrival of the automated image world, from psyops to algorithmic persuasion.
