Trump Redux
As Biden departs the White House, with the Middle East in flames, Europe at war and an arms race stoked in the West Pacific, an analysis of why working-class Democrat voters stayed home in November 2024.
A New Left in Cuba
Amid a worsening economic and climatic situation, cultural opening in Cuba has seen a flourishing blogosphere. Interview with an editor of La Tizza, a collectively run digital magazine that aims to revive the free-thinking Marxism of the Pensamiento Crítico tradition.
Lulismo 3.0: A Mid-Term Diagnosis
The curdling of Brazilian politics, as an energized new right advances at local level, the corrupt swamp of the Centrão holds sway in Congress, while Lula attempts to bargain with capital from the Planalto. What do these trends portend for the country’s future?
Liberalism’s Echoes
Hobsbawm’s contradictory relations with liberalism—and with liberals—from his rescue of the legacy of the French Revolution in Echoes of the Marseillaise to the impasses of Age of Extremes.
Mark Elvin
Introducing a set of texts by and about the outstanding comparative historian, who brought a new degree of conceptual sophistication to the study of the longue-durée ‘patterns’ of the Chinese world.
A Self Portrait
High-spirited third-person autobiographical sketch of the making of a remarkable polymath.
Preface for Chinese Readers 2014
A personal prologue, this was Elvin’s message to a new generation of mainland readers of his classic economic and social history, The Pattern of the Chinese Past.
Lost and Found
The classicist Joseph Bryant explains the importance of Elvin’s newly discovered 2007 Preface to the PRC edition of Pattern of the Chinese Past, setting out the social-historical ontology that informs its interpretative framework.
Unpublished Preface for Chinese Readers 2007
Drafted for Chinese readers, this unpublished preface—discovered only after Elvin’s death in 2023—is a major retrospective assessment, setting out his broader research agenda and registering his own criticisms of his work.
Scattered Dreams
Drawings by Cy Twombly, viewed from the sun-scorched clifftops of Casa Malaparte. The artist’s flight from the mid-century American rejection of beauty, in search of contradictory associations: ancient and modern, emigration and exile, askesis and glamour.
Adorno/Beckett
Critical appreciation of Adorno’s exegesis of a high water mark of postwar modernism, which parried metaphysical and sentimental readings with a lucid historicism. Questions of form and philosophy, historiography and aesthetic experience stimulated by Beckett’s Endgame.
Filming the Ebb Tide
Dwarfed by Hollywood, America’s radical cinema remains under-evaluated. Erika Balsom surveys the restlessly internationalist work of Robert Kramer. Confrontations between subjectivity and history, from Vermont to Vietnam, Utah to Portugal.
Interesting Art
Judgements of the ‘interesting’ dominate critical assessments of contemporary art, but what is the logical structure of these claims? From Schlegel to Donald Judd, a rendering of the unconscious critical schema by which a work becomes ‘of interest’.