December 5th, 2011

Occupy Wall Street and the Rediscovery of Politics

By Jeremy Kessler.

“In taking to the streets with their peculiar brand of leadership and organization, the Occupy Wall Street movement taps into a deep American tradition of outdoor politics: for much of American history, the motor of progressive political change was the assembly of the people out-of-doors, coming together to debate and organize beyond the prescribed avenues of official political reform.”

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December 1st, 2011

Thatcher and Conservatism

By Timothy Stanley.

Ask a Conservative what kind of society they’d like to live in and they’ll generally identify the 1950s. This is highly ironic, because the faithful, decent national community that we imagine the 1950s to have been was also economically highly regulated and strongly wedded to the postwar consensus that Margaret Thatcher tore up.”

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November 9th, 2011

The Age of Uncertainty

 By Sheri Berman.

Particularly in the West, what seems striking about the current period is the widespread sense of the need for change combined with the lack of any coherent plans for it.” 

On discontent and its failure to effect transformation.

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October 28th, 2011

Towards a New Manifesto

By Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

“We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.”

In 1956, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer sat down to write an updated version of the Communist Manifesto. These are previously unpublished notes from their discussions.

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September 27th, 2011

What is Populism?

By Jan-Werner Mueller.

“What populism necessarily denies is the pluralism of contemporary societies: in the populist imagination there is only the people on the one hand and the illegitimate intruders into our politics, from both above and below, on the other.”

An account of what populism is, and why it is dangerous.

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August 15th, 2011

A Lack of Leadership

By Timothy Stanley.

“Most voters are conservative in that they want peace in the streets yet liberal in that they don’t want to use water cannons to get it.”

What Britain can learn from America’s reaction to the riots of the 1960s.

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August 15th, 2011

England Burning

By Alexander Lee.

“If there is a single underlying cause for the riots, it is to be found in the shocking social problems in Britain’s depressed suburbs and in the gradual abandonment of social questions by mainstream political discourse.”

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August 15th, 2011

Seeing King Lear

By Charles Petersen.

Will there ever be a persuasive staging of Lear, or is the aging king condemned forever to remain most at home in the theater of the mind?

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August 12th, 2011

The People Who Might Still Make the Egyptian Revolution

By Martin Eiermann.

“If you are confused”, Amado assures me, “you are on the right track. Everyone in Egypt is confused.”

A Letter from Cairo.

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August 10th, 2011

The Demonization of “Chavs”

By Owen Jones.

“Demonizing people at the bottom has been a convenient way of justifying an unequal society throughout the ages.”

An Anatomy of Britain’s supposed underclass.

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August 10th, 2011

Blight

By Mac McAnulty.

“Blight guts houses and, in the case of New Orleans, whole neighborhoods. Estimates say the city contains over 50,000 blighted properties, battered remnants, most of them left behind during Hurricane Katrina.”

A letter from New Orleans.

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August 10th, 2011

Shatter the Trees and Blow them Away

By Mark Chiusano.

Like everyone else, someone had come up to me, put a pointer finger in the center of my chests, and said, serve your country.  Make us the Gadget, they said, and your name will be forever.”

A short story.

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August 10th, 2011

Decline

By David Hayes.

“In case of rams and horses, Kurnus, / We seek the highest class, / And select the finest specimens / Of ass to breed with ass.”

A new translation of Theognis 183-92.

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May 28th, 2011

Utopias, Vol I: Alastair Campbell

By Alastair Campbell.

“Just because something is unreachable should not deter us from striving for it. So here’s the vision…”

The Utopian inaugurates a series of utopias, written by today’s most interesting philosophers, social scientists, politicians and writers. First up: Alastair Campbell.

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