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
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
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
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
An interview with Magdi el Gizouli Adam Benjamin Sudan’s ongoing war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has killed thousands and displaced millions. The current crisis follows years of political upheaval across the country. In late 2018 and 2019, mass protests calling for democratic rule led to the collapse of the… Read More Marketing War (2023)
the faster these sites multiply, the more planet-heating carbon emissions for the rest of us. Pilita Clark It is just over 40 years since a US political journalist wrote something about scandals that should have been mandatory reading in school classrooms from then on. “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal,” wrote… Read More The great AI data centre cover-up
Tim Barker, Dylan Saba Martin Luther King once called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That formulation may be controversial, but no one denies that the US is by far the world’s biggest arms dealer, with a 42 percent share of the global arms export market. Since the Cold War, Congress… Read More Selling American Bombs
A look at the world’s largest military industries Anna Stavrianakis In 1934, a US Senate Committee chaired by the Republican Gerald Nye began eighteen months of hearings on the domestic arms industry, investigating the enormous profits it had generated from World War I, amid speculation that the “merchants of death” might soon drag America into… Read More Arms Markets
