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.
Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?
In a crowded conference room in January 2025, Hossein Marashi, secretary-general of the Executives of Reconstruction Party and brother-in-law of Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, compared . . .
Two thousand miles north-west of Rio de Janeiro, the Javari Valley is a swathe of the Brazilian Amazon larger than Scotland and accessible only by boat or helicopter. Its ecological riches and isolated . . .
Ahead of last year’s elections to the upper house of the Japanese parliament, Sanseito, a new party of the populist right, ran a ‘Japanese First’ campaign attacking foreign residents and tourists . . .
It’s almost impossible to read any work on meritocracy without being reminded that the word was first used in mid-20th-century Britain to portray a dystopian society, a rigid caste system in which . . .
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.
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.
Economist Ann Pettifor talks to Grace Blakeley about the origins of the Green New Deal, and why we need it.
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.
The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that pass for congressional scrutiny these days; Marco Rubio has stuck especially closely...
Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know what to do with Trump’s tricksy personality because it doesn’t fit the mould. Was...
China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi Jinping a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American...
Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the...
Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate...
Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in circular patterns, propping up turnover and valuations. Colossal amounts of money...
In 1966, as election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara...
The ghost of the industrial revolution haunts Britain. The language of today’s politicians, of unlocking and unleashing the industrial heartlands, is the language of a seance promising communication...
What would politics be like in an age where one empire continued to hold sway over the ‘international community’, as it had done for three or four generations, but had to react to its power weakening...
Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part...
Are we doomed to die out? We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population growth has dramatically slowed and is about to go into reverse. So maybe there is...
I had been back in Nairobi for a few days when I heard that Raila Odinga, the towering opposition figure who played a crucial role in Kenya’s return to multi-party democracy, had died at a clinic...
Thousands of people each year are detained and questioned under Schedule 7, the majority of them from ethnic minority backgrounds. To be held without charge and questioned under threat of criminal prosecution,...
If it were a national economy, cybercrime would be the third largest in the world, behind only the United States and China and growing by 15 per cent a year. By 2027 scams are expected to cost the world...
It’s striking how thoroughly Latin America’s contemporary right has absorbed neoliberalism. Earlier cohorts entertained a range of economic philosophies, depending on what best served their interests...
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...
The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting...
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. But to...
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