What forms of political community did the people of the Middle East imagine for themselves following World War I?
Politics
Editors: Ivan Ascher & Joanne Randa Nucho
J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands
In 1919, those crafting the fate of postwar Europe wanted their designs to be hidden from view. Fortunately, Keynes had other plans.
How Versailles Still Haunts the World
Middle Eastern borders, democratic defeats, the US War on Terror: all this flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.
Solidarity Is a Process: Talking with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Josh Kun, and Destin Jenkins
“Solidarity is not a thing. There’s no formula, no exact science. There is ongoing process.”
Users of the World, Unite?
Critical examinations of the internet too often focus on the successes and failures of corporate leaders, rather than on the real constituents of online communities.
When France Fostered Religious Intolerance
French colonial policies in Algeria created animosity between Jews and Muslims—animosity which the state continues to claim was timeless.
James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere
How the United States terrorizes the rest of the world, Baldwin realized abroad, echoed how it terrorized its inhabitants at home.
Wrongworld
Even with its ambitious and compelling premise of robot revolution, HBO’s Westworld lacks the imagination to follow the story to its logical outcomes.
Water as Right, Water as Future
Declaring water a human right is easy. But to actually secure that right, the best method—surprisingly—is bureaucratic sleights of hand.
Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War
Both violent surveillance and disease risk were integral to Atlantic slavery. That same war against Black people continues today.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
Covid Blindness
Withholding accurate information obscures both the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable and the resurgence of institutional violence.
Are We in Denial about Denial?
Across the political spectrum, people deny how bad the state of the world is. No wonder the far right’s lies have such purchase.
Emergency Urbanism
Housing-justice movements ask: How can unhoused people be considered trespassers on state-owned land?
To Heal the Body, Heal the Body Politic
Before 2020, the relationship that is the body was already ailing. COVID-19 heightens the need to heal it.
Defund the Police and Refund the Communities
The dueling crises of the pandemic and police brutality have brought many problems to the surface of our society and made them impossible to continue to ignore.
Pandemic Déjà Vu
The COVID-19 global pandemic has been described as an unprecedented global event. Yet for some, the virus arrives with uncanny familiarity.
America Comes Out
Once, “coming out” was something done within gay social worlds. Today, new groups do so to refute stigma, and to reclaim that stigma as pride.
What Birders Don’t See
Rather than studying birds—and birders—in isolation, the time has come to see both as linked to the crises of racism and climate change.
“We Don’t Want the Program”: Jill Lepore on How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy
“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”