With Latin America in Trump’s cross-hairs, a report from Buenos Aires on the social stalemate that allowed far-right firebrand Javier Milei to impose the harshest shock therapy in Argentina’s history. Mosquera mobilizes the conceptual legacies of Gramsci, Trotsky, Otto Bauer and Angelo Tasca to identify the function of the region’s highly successful new rights.
Responding to the wide-ranging debate sparked by their ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ (NLR 138), Riley and Brenner expand the temporal frame of their analysis of capitalist stagnation as an endogenous feature, incurable by bubbles and bailouts—and rethink the nature of the ‘political capitalism’ that results.
The built legacy of the Soviet Bloc is undergoing a dramatic reappraisal, from crumbling concrete brutalism to Instagrammable socmod chic. Hatherley’s critical survey of a growing body of work in this area—examining modernist constructions from Vilnius to Tashkent—asks the question the new studies largely avoid: what, if anything, makes this architecture socialist?
Critical analyses of AI usually adopt a stance of defensive humanism. Instead, Nan Da interrogates its mode of reasoning. How do LLMs make the step from data to inference—and what does it mean when they can no longer differentiate the two? Lessons from Emily Dickinson on linguistic interpretation’s necessary freedoms—and responsibilities.
Nicholas Mulder on Arnaud Orain, Le monde confisqué. Reading of the current neo-mercantilist lurch as a return to the norm of long-run capitalist history.
Gabriele Pedullà on Tom Geue, Major Corrections. Intellectual biography of Sebastiano Timpanaro, who brought the tools of philology to bear in a keen-sighted historical materialism.
