Blog

  • What is class today?

    What is class today?

    Common Wealth’s Amelia Horgan spoke to historian Gabriel Winant about class in the twenty-first century. Gabriel Winant is the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press: 2021).

  • A Political Education

    A Political Education

    Alexander Baron, the writer, political activist, journalist, soldier, and prominent figure in mid-twentieth-century British cultural history, is best remembered today as the author of the novels The Human Kind (1953), The Lowlife (1963), and King Dido (1969). In this extract from his recently published memoir Chapters of Accidents, introduced by his son Nick Baron, he recounts his political education in interwar East London.
  • Beyond the Rainbow

    Beyond the Rainbow

    50 years ago today, Gravity's Rainbow, was first published. Here, Jared Marcel Pollen discusses Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece, and its thrilling vision of technological modernity and its mystical offshoots.

  • The Culture War in France

    The Culture War in France

    Anticapitalist class politics have receded from French political discourse and action over the last several decades, replaced in part by what some French figures have identified as an American-influenced identity politics. As Daniel Zamora argues in this essay, however, France has long embraced a home-grown, essentialising politics of identity.
  • The Future is Degrowth: A Five Book Plan

    The Future is Degrowth: A Five Book Plan

    To celebrate Earth Day, the authors of The Future Is Degrowth suggest five books to contextualize the demands of a system hell-bent on perpetual growth and to help conceptualize a world centered around a vision of global ecological justice.
  • A still from the making of How To Blow Up a Pipeline. Photos by Daniel Garber.

    How To Blow Up A Pipeline: A 5 Book Plan

    How to Blow Up a Pipeline is in theaters everywhere! Director/co-writer Daniel Goldhaber, producers/co-writers Jordan Sjol and Ariela Barer, and editor Daniel Garber provide a five book plan for confronting the looming climate apocalypse.
  • The police: between fantasy and instinct

    The police: between fantasy and instinct

    "The police are workers in violence, it is in this explicit capacity that society delegates them, and it is in this capacity that they have chosen this profession, which one does not choose by chance." In this intervention, Frédéric Lordon argues that violence is intrinsic to the social position of police.
  • Winning for a Moment

    Winning for a Moment

    The Columbine High School massacre marked a turning point in the eyes of many, in that it implied the conscious creation of a mise-en-scène, given the meticulous preparation and the elaboration of intellectual motivations.