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The latest episode of the Politics Theory Other podcast. 

Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts... Real gift-giving had its happiness in imagining the happiness of the receiver. It meant choosing, spending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness. Hardly anyone is still capable of this.

For those who can afford it care is expensive, yet the work itself is usually poorly-paid, performed under increasingly stressful conditions and often contracted out to private providers. John Merrick outlines the effects the care crisis is having in his hometown of Crewe. 

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz reflects on anti-Arab racism in post-war France and the relevance of that history on discourses today. 

John Washington, author of The Dispossessed, shares his thoughts on Biden's immigration policy, the ethics of storytelling, and what to expect in the growing fight to open borders.

An interview between Alain Bertho and Simon Brunfaut on the link between crises, authoritarianism, riots, and violence. 

The demand to 'Defund the Police' has been under criticism, either for being out of step with public opinion or miring the rebellious potential of last summer in obscure skirmishes over municipal budgets. Here, Kay Gabriel lays out the strategic wager of campaigning to defund the police, recording the political utility of the demand and accounting for the further organizing that it requires. 

Joy James uses poet Lucille Clifton's image of “new bones” to reflect on a series of revolutionary anniversaries in 2021 and the nature of political leadership.

Police do not prevent gendered violence, but instead reinforce the conditions for its existence and often perpetrate it directly, argue Katharine Jenkins and Koshka Duff. 

Introducing this week's Verso Roundtable, analysing the movement for police and prison abolition a year on from last summer's protests. 

In this excerpt from China In One Village, Liang Hong illustrates the problem of separated couples in the Chinese countryside through the tragic story of a rural woman's suicide.

Sixty years after Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth his image is used to market privatised space travel to the ultra-rich, Thomas Ellis reports.