John Foster / 28 Apr 2023

Never Fully European

David Graeber’s Final Books

David Graeber’s death in September 2020 was a tragedy. Few radicals are as intellectually curious and creative as he was.(...)

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.(...)

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.(...)

Posts navigation