The World at First Light: A New History of the RenaissanceBernd Roeck Tom Verde Historians typically trace the birth of the Renaissance to fourteenth-century Florence. Then, after three centuries, that brilliant era of artistry eventually gave way to the Reformation, with its shift away from humanism, and the Enlightenment, which picked up (and ran) where… Read More Why the West?
The cultural fascination with the middle ages rarely acknowledges that power is still won and abused in the same wayIt makes a mockery of the idea that we use “medieval” as a term of abuse to fling at others, when really it’s a term that correctly defines enduring and deeply shameful characteristics of our own… Read More Our tendency to persecute others is as alive today as in medieval times
Adam Tooze April 17, 2026 In March in Beijing I had the privilege of meeting and talking with Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua. This edited transcript is published in cooperation with Equator Magazine (many thanks to the editorial team there) with an introduction by my friend Kaiser Kuo. Introduction by Kaiser Kuo To sit in Beijing in… Read More The Two-Faced Present – A conversation about the “short twentieth century” – and the paradoxical twenty-first with Wang Hui
Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return… Read More ‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros
Adam Tooze Chartbook 453 Today marks the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa – the opening of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Twenty years ago I published the following passage on the first months of that unprecedentedly bloody campaign, in Wages of Destruction: On 22 June 1941, the Third Reich launched not only the most… Read More 22 June 1941: the 85th anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union
In this issue: IMAGE & SOUND: Reader’s Picks: Books of Note: https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article16781.html ++++++++++++
Authors’ note: This article is adapted from reporting for our book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” The bulk of the reporting took place from the spring of 2023 to the spring of 2026. During that time, we conducted more than 1,000 interviews with a wide range of people close to President… Read More Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files
Presented below is the Foreword by ROBERT ELEGANT. And this is an excellent review: Simon Leys: The art of interpreting non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on a blank page. Book review As his seventieth year approached, Laszlo Ladany decided to retire from the strenuous tasks of periodical scholarship to which he had voluntarily subordinated himself since… Read More LASZLO LADANY: The Communist Party of China and Marxism 1921-1985: A Self-Portrait (1988)
Beyond remittances: A rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers Social anthropologist Shankar Ramaswami’s ‘Souls in the Kalyug’ is a rich, multi-layered text that provides a window into workers’ lives in India, including some hopeful strands within the destructive churnings of global capitalism. Sapan BookshelfSouls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant… Read More Book review: Souls in the Kalyug
Review by Patrick Malcolmson “In a time when tyranny is resurgent all over the globe, in a bewildering variety of forms – military and civilian, theocratic and kleptocratic, ideological and tribal – this book provides a synoptic historical and philosophic perspective that does full justice to the manifold phenomenon in all its range and complexity.”… Read More Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror
After the truth-shower 