Essays
The Challenge of Tackling the Far-Right in France
A year ago, French President Macron surprised everyone by triggering a snap parliamentary election on the evening on the European…
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The Path to Oligarchic Governance
Photos of Donald Trump’s second inauguration showed him surrounded by at least five tech billionaires: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff…
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The Center Needs to Fall Apart: The Democratic Party, Class, Solidarity, and the Failure to Confront Trumpism
Donald Trump won the election, and at the time I’m writing this, he’s been president for nearly six months. The…
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The Illusion of Safety: How Israeli Security Arrangements Undermine Lasting Israeli-Palestinian Peace
Introduction: Israel’s Security Foundations Israel’s security doctrine rests on three conceptual foundations. The first is a defensive military strategy designed…
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The Avant-Garde Film, Revisited
Shortly before his death this year, the film theoretician, P. Adams Sitney, significantly revised one of his earliest articles on…
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Ringing bell hooks: A Brilliant Feminist Calling for Liberation
Spirituality Calls bell hooks sought the transcendent. She was and remains a spiritualist, perhaps more so than a “Black feminist.” At…
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You Do Not Talk About the Spirit of the Age: Revisiting Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated
Twenty years ago, Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated: How Media Shapes the World and the Way You Live in it described…
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On Authenticity: Townes Van Zandt, Natasha Rostova, and the “Uncles”
There is a famous scene in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which Countess Natasha Rostova, recently betrothed and enjoying…
Read Full Article...Memorial: P. Adams Sitney (1944-2025)
A Tribute to P. Adams Sitney
The fact that the Princeton professor most intensely committed to introducing students to the ancient legacies of European and American…
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Remembering P. Adams Sitney
I do not know exactly when I first “met” P. Adams Sitney. He was present at Yale University, when he…
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Exploring Yoruba Across Time and Space: Toyin Falola’s Global Yoruba
Toyin Falola’s book Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks is a landmark in Yoruba Studies, and almost certainly going to become a…
Jonathan Swanson Jacobs’ The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots
The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery (1855) exemplifies—both in its content and…
Book Reviews
Peter Gordon’s A Precarious Happiness
Peter Gordon’s A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, is assuredly one of the best books on Adorno…
Matthew Specter’s The Atlantic Realists
In The Atlantic Realists, Matthew Specter sets out to historicize a tradition of international thought—realism—whose defining feature may be its…
David Mikics’ The Mad Files
Long before I ever read the Communist Manifesto, “the Soul of Man Under Socialism,” or A Peoples History of the…
John Powers’ Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture
Film scholars have in general spent surprisingly little time historicizing, theorizing, and analyzing the technological processes by which films actually…
Hartmut Rosa’s Democracy Needs Religion
Maintaining that our democracy needs religion seems an idea ill-fitted to our times. In the West at least, religion is…
Sarah Wynn Williams’ Careless People
Sarah Wynn Williams was a diplomat in New Zealand and an international lawyer. Inspired by what she saw as Facebook’s formidable…
Benjamin Heim Shepard’s On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting
Introduction In the preface of his most recent book, On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting: Oral Histories, Strategies, and Conflicts, Benjamin…
Matheus Romanetto’s Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm
Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm radiates intelligence and insight. In addition to being thoughtfully written, meticulously researched, and exceptionally compelling,…
Alexei Navalny’s Patriot: A Memoir
A year after his death in a Siberian prison, the New York Times reports, “Even in Death, Navalny Is Seen…
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Between The Issues
From The Archives
