The Long Con: Techno-Austerity

Jackson Lears, 16 July 2015

‘Why is there​ no socialism in the United States?’ the German sociologist Werner Sombart asked himself in 1906 – it was also the title of his most famous book. The question...

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American intelligence saw Islamic State coming and was not only relaxed about the prospect but, it appears, positively interested in it.

Read more about The Hijackers: What will happen to Syria?

In Holloway prison​, in March 1909, Constance Lytton decided to carve the words ‘Votes for Women’ across her chest. She had been locked up for taking part in suffragette protests...

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Sinicisation: Sinicisation

Slavoj Žižek, 16 July 2015

Everyone can be a socialist today, even Bill Gates: it suffices to profess the need for some kind of harmonious social unity, for a common good and for the care of the poor and downtrodden.

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Why join Islamic State?

Patrick Cockburn, 2 July 2015

The fall of Tal Abyad is the latest Kurdish victory in the ‘war within a war’ being waged between Islamic State fighters and the military wing of the PYD.

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Harold Koh​ is the former dean of Yale Law School and an expert in human rights law. As the State Department’s senior lawyer between 2009 and 2013, he provided the Obama administration...

Read more about Short Cuts: Human Rights Window Dressing

Diary: Massacre in Andijan

Anna Neistat, 2 July 2015

In May​ 2005, in the city of Andijan in eastern Uzbekistan, 23 local businessmen were on trial, accused of being Islamic extremists. There had been a peaceful protest outside the court building...

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‘We ain’t found shit’

Scott Ritter, 2 July 2015

The intelligence about the ‘possible military dimensions’ of Iran’s nuclear programme is of questionable provenance and most of it is more than a dozen years old.

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Short Cuts: Declared un-British

Sadakat Kadri, 18 June 2015

The removal​ of citizenship has been used as a penalty for disloyalty only rarely in Britain. A handful of spies with dual nationality were denaturalised during the Cold War, but the last case...

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Of the dozen or so people who have declared themselves Republican candidates, or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure.

Read more about The Candidates: Scott, Rick, Ted, Marco and Jeb

Dark Markets

Donald MacKenzie, 4 June 2015

‘Dark pools’​ are private, electronic share-trading venues in which a participant can bid to buy shares or offer to sell them without those bids or offers being visible to the...

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Labour dies again

Ross McKibbin, 4 June 2015

As the pollsters retire​ to their attics to discover what went wrong, we can reflect on this historic election. The share of the total vote won by the two major parties changed only slightly,...

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Diary: In Sanaa

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, 21 May 2015

Early last year, the Houthis, followers of a revivalist anti-Western cleric, moved out of their northern highlands and marched south towards Sanaa.

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The Caregivers’ Disease

Paul Farmer, 21 May 2015

Graham Greene​’s Journey without Maps is an account of a trek he made across West Africa in 1935. He started in Sierra Leone, then a British colony, crossed through a sliver of French...

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‘Delusions of grandeur’, of which believing oneself to be Napoleon became the archetype, rose to extraordinary medical and cultural prominence during the July Monarchy

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On ‘Spoofing’: Spoofing

Donald MacKenzie, 21 May 2015

On 21 April​, the financial trader Navinder Singh Sarao was arrested in West London. The US authorities are seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois after charges were issued...

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Notes on the Election

David Runciman, 21 May 2015

This election​ promised to produce constitutional confusion and uncertainty and instead it has delivered stark clarity. The British electoral system values clarity: few people dissent from the...

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Freddie Gray

Adam Shatz, 21 May 2015

A few weeks ago​, I took my daughter to MoMA, where the sixty panels in Jacob Lawrence’s 1941 Migration series have at last been assembled in their entirety. As a 23-year-old black...

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