On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
Read MoreClub for the retired sons of indulgent fathers, Rea Irvin, 1914 by Guy Standing The 20th century income distribution system has broken down irreparably. Recall the post-1945 consensus under which the shares of income going to capital and to labour were roughly stable, when workers and corporations shared the gains from productivity growth, and when…
Read MoreFiston Mwanza Mujila was announced winner of the 2015 Etisalat Literature Prize at a grand ceremony in Lagos on March 19, 2016.
Read MoreIt is a truth too often accepted, that a modernist writer with Virginia Woolf’s feminist and elitist tendencies, had no use for Victorians in general and for Charles Dickens in particular.
Read MoreIf hedge funds go up and down alongside the market, and all but the top performers don’t even beat the market, the rationale for investing in them vanishes.
Read MoreI’m in India. Or at least that’s what my perceptual experience, consciousness, and mind are telling me. It’s hard to know for sure. The reason I have doubts surrounds the immateriality of my being here, and moreover, the immateriality of India itself.
Read MoreFor most of the last century, newspapers were a licence to print money. Sports car-driving sales people boasted of turning down clients because the paper was too full; they couldn’t take another ad.
Read MoreI came here to swim in the highest pool in Europe, 52 floors above the station. The surface of this infinity pond, shivering with reflections like a Fun House mirror, memory-ripples of exercisers now taking their ease on Roman couches.
Read More“I’m sorry, could the gentleman repeat the question?” he asked, even though he’d heard damn well what had been said. That was just one of many in Dr. Don Parker Jr.’s baggage of tricks—asking folks to repeat themselves.
Read MoreI am seeing the worst minds of my generation redeemed by money, eager ambitious loaded, working their way up the career path at Yale…
Read MoreIn the beginning there was not the city, but the resistant shard; not the organic community, but more or less the cumbersome fragments.
Read MoreAfter the Fall, progress toward free markets and multiparty politics was slow. Todor Zhivkov, the longest-serving general secretary in the Eastern Bloc, may have been deposed the day after the Berlin Wall came down, but it wasn’t necessarily the chief cause.
Read MoreThe rich get rich through wealth extraction, not wealth creation. It’s time that was put to an end.
Read MoreTo distinguish between “good riots” like in Boston and the “bad riots” in Ferguson is itself an exercise in historical amnesia practiced by the left and right.
Read MoreRacism persists, especially in its more invisible and subtle forms. Terms including modern racism, symbolic racism, and aversive racism, emphasize forms of racial discrimination that are “more likely than ever to be disguised and covert,” in contrast to the more popularly recognized “old-fashioned” varieties of racism characterized by “overt racial hatred” and public displays of bigotry.
Read MoreA powerful capitalist class of bankers, real-estate developers, and investors is driving gentrification, using a mixture of huge loans (to which only they have access) and government funding to push land values higher.
Read MoreI don’t know if I ever wanted to become a theorist. I struggle with this position. For me, it’s a hystericized — and therefore neurotic — position, through and through. I’m sometimes repulsed by my own behavior; I hate theorizing because I can’t stop doing it. It’s lunacy. I question too much, I always have, and I’m often too hasty with it all.
Read MorePhotograph via EPP by Yudit Kiss Fidesz does not have any coherent ideology, but depending on the context, employs elements of various currents, mixing neo-conservative tropes (God, Patria, Family) with anti-globalization arguments (anti-corporation, anti-finance), classic populist slogans with anti-EU and anti-minority refrains echoed by extreme right groups. After Prime Minister Orban Viktor declared, while in…
Read MoreThis is a response to the criticisms – which I interpret as requests for additional information – that were published in the Financial Times on May 23 2014. These criticisms only refer to the series reported in chapter 10 of my book Capital in the 21st century, and not to the other figures and tables presented in the other chapters, so in what follows I will only refer to these series.
Read MoreJean Améry titled his renowned book on voluntary death, Hand an Sich Legen – To lay Hands on Oneself. Beyond the argument of Amery (who killed himself in 1978), I’ve always found this image very appropriate. It describes with precision and grace a terrible gesture.
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