Where Bolton’s most deep-seated desire is to lay waste to America’s enemies, Trump is absorbed by the prospect of abandoning old friends, or at least extorting them with the threat of abandonment....

Read more about Short Cuts: John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness

He was a heretic who remained on the left, never a Cold War renegade who sang the virtues of capitalism or colonialism. Had he done so, many avenues would have opened up for him in the West. His books...

Read more about Inquisition Mode: Victor Serge’s Defective Bolshevism

Anglo-America’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. Nevertheless, the...

Read more about Flailing States: Anglo-America Loses its Grip

The past decade should have taught governments to beware of hasty large-scale remodelling. But it seems only to have emboldened the Johnson apparat to go flat out for more of the same. It may still seem...

Read more about Superman Falls to Earth: Boris Johnson’s First Year

The true significance of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s election, and of Trump’s attack on the WHO and China, may be as markers of how radically the world has changed since the WHO was founded, and of...

Read more about The Health Transformation Army: What can the WHO do?

The colour-coding on Charles Booth’s maps was far from innocent. At one extreme the glamour and heraldic grandeur of gold for, say, Grosvenor Square or Hyde Park; at the other, black for Whitechapel...

Read more about The general tone is purple: Where the Poor Lived

Ask Mike: City Government

David Runciman, 18 June 2020

The sort of city government Rahm Emanuel champions has only been made possible because the nation-state now exists to shoulder much of the burden of warfare and finance. It is one of the luxuries of the...

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Short Cuts: The Manifesto Instinct

Joanna Biggs, 18 June 2020

Sex workers com­pare their struggle to that of care workers. Trans activists compare the control they want over their bodies to the control de­manded by abortion activists. Single wom­en fight for the...

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Julian Assange in Limbo

Patrick Cockburn, 18 June 2020

Many of the secrets uncovered weren’t particularly significant or indeed very secret. In themselves they don’t explain the degree of rage WikiLeaks provoked in the US government and its allies. This...

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America Explodes

Adam Shatz, 18 June 2020

The United States now faces a serious challenge to its international legitimacy – as serious as the one it faced during the Jim Crow era. The demonstrators have put not just the police but the nation...

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Short Cuts: In Tripoli

Jérôme Tubiana, 4 June 2020

In late March, Yonas heard that another rescue boat, the Alan Kurdi, was on its way to Libyan waters. But he didn’t manage to get on board. On 7 April, the boat, crammed with 150 migrants, headed for...

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In Beijing

Long Ling, 4 June 2020

I replied no to each question and then asked: ‘What if someone hides this information?’ Without looking up she said: ‘Nobody can hide. Everything is under control.’

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The Inequality Engine

Geoff Mann, 4 June 2020

According to Thomas Piketty, history demonstrates that the means deployed to address the problem of legitimacy are only ever partly material. The more important means are ideological: at the very least,...

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The American Virus

Eliot Weinberger, 4 June 2020

Throughout his presidency, Trump has had a favourability rating of around 40 per cent. (He is the only president never to have gone above 50 per cent.) Now, despite the tens of thousands dead and the tens...

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A Great Wall to Batter Down

Adom Getachew, 21 May 2020

Priyamvada Gopal’s focus isn’t on the ways colonial subjects negotiated, resisted and reclaimed the empire, so much as on the ways in which imperial crisis awakened dissent at the metropolitan centre....

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As his country’s grand strategist, Mussolini’s incurable delusion was that a highly staged military parade, with the same tanks turning up again and again, was proof of actual military capabilities...

Read more about Not Uniquely Incompetent: Mussolini’s Unrealism

Scotland’s Dreaming

Rory Scothorne, 21 May 2020

Independence is not inevitable, but it is now the engine of Scottish electoral politics, giving shape to its party system, providing motivation for its activists and guaranteeing a constant flow of controversy...

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On 15 March – two days before Netanyahu was due to appear in court, the first time in Israel’s history that a sitting prime minister would go on trial – the justice minister announced that the courts...

Read more about Covid-19 in the Time of Netanyahu: Bibi has done it again