Collective Property, Private Control

Laleh Khalili: Defence Tech, 5 June 2025

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West 
by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska.
Bodley Head, 295 pp., £25, February, 978 2 84792 852 5
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Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War 
by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff.
Scribner, 319 pp., £20, August 2024, 978 1 6680 3138 4
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... You may remember​ Palantir as the company that was given access to all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the largest NHS technology contract to date. Palantir’s first sales pitch to a UK agency came much earlier, in 2008, when its representatives gave a demo to an enthusiastic audience at GCHQ ...

Gargantuanisation

John Lanchester, 22 April 2021

Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula 
by Laleh Khalili.
Verso, 368 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 1 78663 481 8
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... has played a role in world-historical conjunctures and disjunctures. In Sinews of War and Trade, Laleh Khalili tells the story of the canal and of the historical and economic currents which have flowed through it and been enabled by its presence. The book focuses on the Saudi peninsula, whose centrality to questions of trade between east and west is ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia ...

Where do we touch down?

Jeremy Harding: Bruno Latour’s Habitat, 15 December 2022

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo 
by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose.
Polity, 80 pp., £9.99, November 2022, 978 1 5095 5506 2
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After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis 
by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose.
Polity, 180 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 5002 9
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... fuel companies pretend to sue for peace and greenery as they push forward with extraction. (As Laleh Khalili noted in the last issue of the LRB, ‘more than six hundred fossil fuel lobbyists, the most at any COP conference, registered as delegates’ at Sharm El-Sheikh – ‘a quarter more than the year before’, according to the ...