The Merkel era in Germany—and Europe—brought to an end by the crushing defeat of her party. Prospects for country and continent under the enlarged ‘extreme centre’ of Scholz, Lindner and the Greens. Does the resurrection of the SPD conceal a shuffle to the right?

A critical engagement with Isabel Wilkerson’s revival of the ‘caste school of race relations’ that flourished in the US social sciences in the 1940s. How might other international outcast groups—Dalits, Jews, Roma, Burakumin—compare to African-Americans? What logics explain their unique condition?

Examination of the UK’s dominant political cultures, social liberalism and national conservatism, battling for hegemony within and between the major parties, and buffeted by economic storms. A sober reckoning with the lessons of Corbynism and hopes invested in an unreformable Labour Party.

What might shed light on an enigmatic film in the absence of the artist? Sensitive reading, via literary underdrawings, of Chinese filmmaker and novelist Hu Bo’s masterwork, An Elephant Sitting Still. J. X. Zhang detects a ‘structure of feeling’ distinct from that of Sixth Generation cinema.

Plots that stylize class conduct, literary structures imitating historical ones, formal fractures indexing historical impasses, literature as the discoverer of new knowledge: Roberto Schwarz’s studies of Machado de Assis as models for a distinctive Marxist criticism.

Interrogation of Hartmut Rosa’s phenomenology of social acceleration and call to repoliticize the question of the good life, along axes of vibrant ‘resonance’ with the world. The intellectual heir of Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor, between critique and adaptation.