John Foster / 24 Feb 2023
The Biggest Failure Ever
R. T. Howard’s Spying on the Reich
From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the interwar period was a preamble to catastrophe.(...)
books
John Foster / 16 Dec 2022
Fantasy Island
Free Market: The History of an Idea, by Jacob Soll
It’s as though the 1980s never happened. For many Gen Xers like me, until the 2008 financial crisis, the free market was the only game in town.(...)
John Foster / 09 Dec 2022
Return to Politics
Power and Resistance, by Yoshiyuki Sato
No stranger to hyperbole, Slavoj Žižek once described an event as a reframing of the present, “a radical change in this reality itself”.(...)
John Foster / 25 Nov 2022
Think Different
Culture from the Slums, by Jeff Hayton
Based on the flurry of academic titles about it over the last decade, punk has become as common to college curriculums as it is to the Top 40. Why this took so long is baffling.(...)
John Foster / 04 Nov 2022
Alienated by Technology
Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, by Byung Chul-Han
When talk of the “information age” first began in the 1960s, it implied optimism. Information is knowledge, of which more is better than less, generally speaking.(...)
John Foster / 10 Oct 2022
Surviving Fascism
Philosophy and Sociology, by Theodor Adorno
Looking back from a distance of more than half a century, 1960 appears almost as a period of calm.(...)
John Foster / 22 Jul 2022
Virtual Colonialism
Geographies of Digital Exclusion, by Mark Graham and Martin Dittus
In all but the most prosaic discussions of cartography today, it’s obligatory to mention “On Exactitude in Science.”(...)
John Foster / 08 Jul 2022
Stupid and Dangerous
The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, by Oliver Eagleton
Boris Johnson has been a dead man walking for months. His resignation has been more of a relief than a shock.(...)
John Foster / 10 Jun 2022
Status Quo Apologist
Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama has a fraught relationship with history. In the late 1980s, he thought it was over.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 08 Jun 2022
Switzerland or Bust
Return to Magic Mountain
Ever since I finished Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, I have been trying to find a way of explaining why it’s worth reading that prioritises the words on the page rather than my idiosyncratic response to them. (...)