Blog

  • Quick Fixes: a Letter from the Editor

    Quick Fixes: a Letter from the Editor

    "Beneath the bright descriptions, interesting contradictions and energetic prose, lurks an impressive materialist account of drugs and American capitalism."
  • The Nightmare and Dream of Autonomous Policing

    The Nightmare and Dream of Autonomous Policing

    Despite a wave of criticism, both the NYPD and LAPD have moved forward with plans to implement Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicles – more commonly referred to as "Robot Police Dogs" – into their departments' fleets. In this excerpt from After Black Lives Matter, Cedric G. Johnson breaks down the implications of such a move.
  • After Work: a Letter from the Editor

    After Work: a Letter from the Editor

    "Study after study over the last century has confirmed again and again: technology has not reduced the amount of time spent on domestic labour in the home. How can that be true?"

  • We're So Glad It's You

    We're So Glad It's You

    As Adolph Reed wrote in 2014, liberals don't believe in politics anymore, only bearing witness to suffering. Here, former US diplomat Josef Burton asks what the moral universe of contemporary liberalism consists of when all hope for change is foreclosed.
  • Herbert Marcuse and 'cultural Marxism'

    Herbert Marcuse and 'cultural Marxism'

    "Using the term ‘cultural Marxism’, and the failure to dutifully apprehend its meaning, may allude to a wider Brexit culture war within which anti-Semitic tropes can be subsumed." Patrick Garratt looks into the origins of the anti-semitic trope, and the relevance of Marcuse’s social theory in the new era of ‘culture wars’.

  • For an Inch of Blue Sea

    For an Inch of Blue Sea

    In May of 1934, Osip Mandelstam was arrested and interrogated by the OGPU for composing and reciting "The Stalin Epigram." This excerpt from Ralph Dulti’s new biography of Osip Mandelstam details Mandelstam’s life and work after his first brush with the Soviet authorities.

     

  • Kitsch and woo-woo: cinematic visions of the ultrarich

    Kitsch and woo-woo: cinematic visions of the ultrarich

    Recent years have seen a boom in cinematic fantasies of the uber-wealthy where viewers are treated to mass spectacles of excess. But can any of them ever match the reality of the new elite, which is always dumber, more tasteless, and yet still more morally grotty than fiction could allow?