Writing about how (not) to commit fraud by Walter Benjamin, Deborah Friedell, Daniel Soar, Vadim Nikitin, Steven Shapin, Pooja Bhatia, James Lasdun, Bee Wilson, John Lanchester and Robert Marshall-Andrews.
The main road west from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was abandoned by travellers during the war in the region twenty years ago. The needle-like jebels – volcanic hills – were redoubts for bandits. The road is now nicknamed sharia al-hawa, or the route of the air. The new road between El Fasher and the town of Tawila is barely any safer. It’s known as tariq al-mawt – the road of death.
‘I think we’ll get five,’ President Trump said, and five was what he got. At his prompting, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature remapped the districts to be used in next year’s elections . . .
What was Nigel Farage before he was Reform UK, before he was the Brexit Party, before he was Ukip? Farage insists that he started out as a run-of-the-mill Tory – just another true-blue Thatcherite . . .
On 21 April 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen became the first leader of a far-right party to reach the run-off of a French presidential election. France was astonished. For two weeks, daily anti-fascist demonstrations . . .
Reform UK held its first conference in October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven . . .
The inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.
By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.
Environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Edward Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation.
The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?
In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying...
In The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...
Our peoples are already too bound up with each other in conflict and a shared history of persecution for an American-style pow-wow to heal the wounds and open the way forward. There is still a victim and a victimiser. But there can be solidarity in struggling to end the inequities, and for Israelis in pressuring their government to end the occupation, the expropriation and the settlements. The Palestinians, after all, have very little left to give.
A lot of people throughout Europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the Maastricht Treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives....
Writing about how (not) to commit fraud by Walter Benjamin, Deborah Friedell, Daniel Soar, Vadim Nikitin, Steven Shapin, Pooja Bhatia, James Lasdun, Bee Wilson, John Lanchester and Robert Marshall-Andrews.
Writing about political corruption from the LRB archive by Peter Geoghegan, Paul Foot, Deborah Friedell, Conor Gearty, Eliane Glaser, Perry Anderson, Simon Jenkins, Jenny Diski, Uri Avnery and Sidney Blumenthal.
David Runciman reflects on Trump, Brexit and threats to democracy, with some help from Alexis de Tocqueville.
Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity.
We hear David's thoughts on why so many people - including podcasts like this one! - keep calling elections wrong.
Worst-case scenarios for democracy - especially since Trump's victory - hark back to how democracy has failed in the past. So do we really risk a return to the 1930s?
We catch up with Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson about the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine.
David, Helen and other Talking Politics regulars gather the morning after the Tory triumph the night before to discuss how they did it and what it means.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
What exactly was Tony Benn’s significance? He was certainly an unusually clear analyst and critic of the distribution of power in Britain. ‘We live in a strange country,’ he said in his final Commons...
To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the...
Any form of ‘just transition’ – managing the move to a greener economy while also protecting workers and communities – seems implausible in the context of spiralling energy costs, failed climate...
The winners in an autocracy have little in common with the losers, but putting on aviator sunglasses or a leather jacket and watching UFC seems to build gender solidarity. It remains unclear whether young...
Calling himself the ‘coolest dictator in the world’, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized the monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s...
It is the least convincing cliché of the age that ‘globalisation has passed its sell-by date.’ On the contrary, tariff mania seems like a frantic attempt to resurrect the past, not unlike those nostalgic...
More than an hour after the bombing of Evin Prison, the guards finally came out of their offices. From behind a locked door they began shouting at the prisoners in the women's ward. ‘See?’ they yelled....
Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief...
With the proscription of Palestine Action early in July, the question of what support for a terrorist group means has become urgent. Very few people in Britain supported al-Qaida; many more support the...
For a long time, it had seemed that Assad might outlast everything. Then, almost overnight, it was over. And with his fall came the possibility, however fragile, of accountability. Yet high-ranking officials...
Graeber seems to have had most fun as an outsider, a movement anthropologist wending his way among anticapitalist militants, arguing and taking field notes. He would arrive with his notepad, ready to...
I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons...
Austerity is a choice. The protection of the family at the expense of other ways of living is a choice. The transfer of public wealth to private wealth is a choice – it’s a choice to make housing a...
Humanitarian aid has long served as cover for Israeli crimes. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying force is charged with caring for the population under its control. Yet rather than compel Israel...
The standard assessment of the British armed forces is that they have become ‘hollowed out’. The army has too few tanks and too little artillery to form the armoured divisions its own plans demand....
In my own For You journey into Faragism, I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of some form or other: retiring to live off passive income or emigrating to a less broken...
In aerospace, engineering, technology, construction, health and defence, the rush is on to grab as many fat contracts as possible. Companies from these sectors, and others, are jumping into bed with regimes...
There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an experience that has been buried for decades. Part of the work is giving practical information,...
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