One of the most under-reported factors behind the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt was the rise in food prices in the Middle East over the last year. It’s simple, really: hungry people become...
For those who have been living under a rock (or worse, been offline), the world is supposed to end today. More accurately, a group of fringe evangelical Christians in California led by Harold...
Adam Kostko, Awkwardness, O books, 2010 It's a sign of a good piece of cultural criticism that it makes you re-evaluate a piece of art you'd previously discarded as uninteresting or even unpleasant....
We’re all in this together. We must share the sacrifice. The austerity narratives of deficit reduction are everywhere. Yet the facts show that this is a false story deployed cynically to...
Laurie Penny is an English journalist who came into the public eye last year with her gripping coverage of the student protests and occupations. She writes a column for the New Statesman, as well...
Gregory Jusdanis, Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature. Stanford UP, 2010. Is literature dead or dying? What comes after the book? Are people still interested in stories? These are just some...
Every sperm is sacred, goes the old Monty Python song, but it might well be the new motto of the Republican Party in 2011. Since their victory in 2010 midterms, Republican politicians (with a few...
The Verso Book of Dissent, Ed. Andrew Hsiao and Andrea Lim, Verso, 2010. The Idea of Communism, Ed. Coustas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2010. Stephen Colbert once famously said that...
This year, revolution is in the air. It is on the streets of Tunis and Cairo, in Tripoli, Athens and Madison. It is in hearts and minds, on the airwaves and TV channels, on the page, online and...
Over the last 6 months, the epitaphs for the multicultural project have been steadily growing. On Febuary 5th, as 3000 fascists marched through Luton chanting anti-Islam slogans, Prime Minster...