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The Room for Best

Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.

Inventing Guilt

The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is not just an attack on one activist, it is a chilling demonstration of how the state can manufacture criminality in real time, silencing dissent without justification or consequence.

Trump’s Peace Plan Is Just Surrender by Another Name

Donald Trump claimed he would end the war in Ukraine on “day one,” yet 54 days into his presidency, the conflict rages on, because his so-called peace plan is nothing more than a capitulation to Putin’s imperial ambitions.

Photograph of Harlow Town railway station in 2007

Everything, Even Ruins, Is a Choice

The ruins Owen Hatherley documented over a decade ago, of modernist ambition, of public housing, of a Britain that once believed in itself, have only deepened, and with a new New Labour government poised to repeat the same failed housing policies, the cycle of speculation, privatisation, and social cleansing shows no sign of ending.

Empire in Disarray

Hal Draper’s ‘America as Overlord’ is a study of imperial necessity, how the United States became the regulator of global capitalism, why its dominance persisted, and what happens when the system it upholds begins to fracture.

Photograph of Joan Didion in 1970

Waiting for the Inevitable

In 2024, as the old narratives collapse and the sense of waiting tightens into dread, Joan Didion’s work feels less like a record of the past than a map of the present.

The Cybernetic Chain-Gang

Algorithmic management does not simply discipline workers; it renders the very logic of their exploitation opaque, and in Cyberboss, Craig Gent dissects this transformation with forensic precision.