Blog

  • Promise me this, my child

    Promise me this, my child

    Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality.

  • Antithesis by Theodor Adorno

    Antithesis by Theodor Adorno

    The subjugation of life to the process of production imposes as a humiliation on everyone something of the isolation and solitude that we are tempted to regard as resulting from our own superior choice.

  • The Sociology of Grovelling

    The Sociology of Grovelling

    The toast of Tory and Labour leaders alike, the British Monarchy offers eloquent testimony to the persistence of the country’s Old Regime. These excerpts from Tom Nairn’s The Enchanted Glass, first published during the cultural reaction of the Thatcher years, offer a republican antidote to Jubilee kitsch and state-sponsored sycophancy.

  • Profiting from their misery: Britain's private prisons

    Profiting from their misery: Britain's private prisons

    Britain's prison system has, since the Europe’s first privately run prison was opened in East Yorkshire in April 1992, become increasingly privatised and run for profit. Here, Hatty Nestor explains how we got here, and how the burgeoning Prison Abolitionist movement can help us chart a way out.

  • Pandemic profiteers forever: how privatised medicine fails the world

    Pandemic profiteers forever: how privatised medicine fails the world

    Pharma companies have made a killing on the pandemic, in part by refusing to share vaccine technology with manufacturers in the Global South. Though companies like Pfizer hide behind the argument that only profit incentives can drive innovation, Tim Bierley shows that knowledge sharing and publicly-funded pharmaceutical development leads to more equitable production and distribution of vaccines and medications.

  • The political legacy of John Berger's art criticism

    The political legacy of John Berger's art criticism

    John Berger's unique and uncompromising voice as an art critic owed in large part to his political commitments. A unapologetic Marxist, Berger judged art not simply by its aesthetic value but by its capacity to help its observers recognize their collective power.