Politics Archives - Page 2 of 143

Economy

Goldbugs

An excerpt from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

November 17, 2025 • by Quinn Slobodian

People make bad money, and that money makes bad people.— Peter Boehringer Monetary issues have long divided neoliberals. Can you trust a central bank to manage currency? Can the growth of the money supply be made automatic? Should fixed or floating rates reign in global currency markets? Must money be backed ...

Genocide

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

A review of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

November 14, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

With the release of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso, October 2025), editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro bring us a powerful addition to a lamentable literary genre: the genocide anthology. Comprising more than 20 works of poetry, art, essays, and reportage by 23 contributors—many of them Palestinian—this volume ...

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part III

“Here at our sea-bashed gates she gloats and stands”

November 12, 2025 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART III, THAT OLD COLONIC So like the braised gullet of bleak shame,With plundering lips that glide on branded hands;Here at our sea-bashed gates she gloats and stands,A bronzy woman with a piece, whose flameIs an enfrissoned blighting, and her nameBreeder of Exiles. From her beaked handSpews world-wide hell—come, ...

New York City

What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

On zoning, New York City’s housing crisis, and Abundance

November 4, 2025 • by Achilles Kallergis

The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made ...

Literature

Shakespeare Among the French Romantics

One way to take the temperature of a society in crisis

October 30, 2025 • by Sophia Charles

In 1776, Voltaire penned a letter to the Académie Française. His subject was Shakespeare, his mood grim. He was responding to a new translation into French of the playwright’s work, still little known to France. In the context of the French Enlightenment, Shakespeare came as a shock. Instead of dramatizing nobility of ...

New York City

A Mayor Who Promises the Moon

Canvassing for Mamdani

October 29, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

In the run-up to this year’s election for New York City’s next mayor, I’ve spent several days canvassing for Zohran Mamdani. On every occasion I’ve been as much as a half-century older than the rest of my young, white comrades. Unlike most of them, I’m also a native New Yorker, ...

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part II

October 29, 2025 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART II But he though blind of sight,Despis'd and thought extinguish't quite,With inward eyes illuminatedHis fierie vertue rouz'dFrom under ashes into sudden flame,And as an ev'ning Dragon came,Assailant on the perched roosts …And though her body die, her fame survives,A secular bird ages of lives. —Samson Agonistes Captain Kirk: crisscross ...

Democracy

Can Poetry Re-Enchant the Modern World?

The philosopher Charles Taylor goes hunting for cosmic connections

October 27, 2025 • by Sarah V. Schweig

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s ...

Activism

Should Universities Just Leave?

How can institutions fostering open inquiry survive authoritarian assaults?

October 23, 2025 • by Anastasija Mladenovska

Over the past year, I have tracked the journeys of five universities caught in the crosshairs of authoritarian pressure: Central European University (CEU) in Hungary; the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) in Russia; Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan; and the American University ...

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part I

“This is the plague after the plague”

October 15, 2025 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART I Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.—Song of Songs, 2:15 I have become a brother to the jackals, and go about in the company of ostriches.—Job, 30:29 Our vineyard is titanium and glassand the little foxes flickerin the ...

Economy

Panama Against Trump

A country’s fate hangs in the balance as protestors take to the streets

October 13, 2025 • by Nolan Young

As Donald Trump prepared to take office in late 2024, the American president-elect issued a stunning threat: to “take back” the Panama Canal, almost a quarter century after the United States had returned control of the canal and the zone around it to the sovereign state of Panama. Once in office, ...

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...