Tom Engelhardt ( Tom Engelhardt Substack) – I recently drove to a gas station in Massachusetts to fill my tank with regular gas, the cheapest around, and, to my surprise, given what’s going on, it was only $4.59 a gallon. Okay, okay, I take back that “only” and admit it. It’s not good to joke about the nightmare… Read More America’s Imperial Wars, from Korea to Iran
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?
From “The Burnout Society” to “The Tonality of Thought,” tech philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s ultra-short books reveal why online liberation has felt more like voluntary captivity. Matt Elmore Byung-Chul Han is one of Europe’s most widely read philosophers. His audience in the United States has grown considerably over the last decade, though mostly outside the academy;… Read More Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? The philosophy of Byung-Chul Han
As the bombing starts again, it’s clear the president has dragged the US into a limitless fiasco – and the world into an economic quagmire Simon Tisdall Feckless and clueless, Donald Trump is lost in Iran, unable to find a way out of the disastrous war he started. Once again, the US military is pummelling the… Read More Trump, not Iran, is the world’s greatest danger. He’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction
NB: An excellent commentary; except for one misnomer: when it comes to Western imperial establishments and their hangers-on, it’s not their moral stupidity, but their moral depravity that we are confronted with. The truth is as clear as crystal: they are irredeemably racist, as racist as the Nazi jurists who concocted the phrase ‘life not… Read More Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity
Gautam Bhatia The author has won the Ran Hirschl Prize for the Best Article in Constitutional Studies This essay argues that the relationship between constitutionalism and economic inequality must be understood in the context of the relationship between constitutionalism and political economy. In particular, the concept of the separation of the economic and the political—which… Read More Economic Inequality & Separation of the Economic & the Political in Modern Constitutionalism
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
Pravin Raj Singh At its core, a literature syllabus is more than a list of prescribed texts. It is a pedagogical contract, a space where students and educators commit to engaging with the world’s complexities, however uncomfortable. This contract enables critical engagement with power, history, caste, gender and the structures that shape our lives. It… Read More The Quiet Dismantling of Liberal Education at Delhi University
Joe Miller in Washington, George Hammond in San Francisco and Chris Cook in London Published Jul 8 2026 The week after a US immigration enforcement officer killed an American mother of three on the streets of Minneapolis in January, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” posted on social media a slickly produced, AI-generated video set to a music track called “Clubbed… Read More The price of Palantir’s politics
Nivedita Menon on July 9; 2026 At Jantar Mantar As I was leaving the protest site of the Cockroach Janta Party at Jantar Mantar where I had gone to express solidarity – on July 5th, the sixteenth day of the struggle – a young man who had also just stepped out, approached me to ask… Read More Cockroach Janta Party – a turning point for a dying democracy?
After the truth-shower 