The rest of the blog
“Palestine is not a digression from the climate movement. It is its centre.” That’s the force of Andreas Malm’s pamphlet, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. It doesn’t ask for reflection. It demands action. This isn’t a balanced account of Gaza or a theory of climate collapse. Instead it’s a weaponised intervention against the politics of impunity. What Malm offers is a raw and necessary link: between the bombs that fall on Jabaliya and the storms that drown Derna, between settler colonialism and fossil capital, between the rubble of Akka in 1840 and the rubble of Gaza in 2024. The pamphlet is furious, and entirely justified. It should be read, and used.
Angel Down opens in shriek and filth and never lets up. Kraus has written what feels like the literary equivalent of a migraine, long, unpunctuated, looping sentences, bodily fluids everywhere, voices caked in mud and irony. This isn’t Birdsong, and thank god for that. It’s closer to Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting rewritten by a trench-rat high on ether.
What’s being rolled out at Northwestern and other campuses is not a programme to protect Jewish students from abuse. It’s a mechanism to discipline campus speech, to teach students that anti-Zionism is taboo and that political critique must defer to geopolitical orthodoxy. It doesn’t mention the Nakba. It doesn’t mention the occupation. It doesn’t mention that many Jews oppose Zionism. These trainings don’t fight antisemitism, they flatten it into a tool of state ideology.
Caroline Lane wasn’t looked for because the system didn’t need to see her. The system still got paid. That’s the quiet scandal at the heart of Saltwater Mansions. It begins as a mystery, a vanished woman, a locked flat, a pile of unopened post, but becomes something stranger and sadder: an inquiry into how a person can disappear while everything around them keeps functioning. David Whitehouse isn’t writing true crime. He’s writing about the grief we ignore, the relationships we don’t ask about, the neighbours we forget to see. What remains is not just absence, it’s a mirror.
On Dennis Fritz’s Deadly Betrayal
On Daniel Finkelstein’s Defence of Police Violence and the Thatcherite Rewriting of Class Struggle
Trump’s new tariffs aren’t a return to protectionism so much as a sign that capital, cornered and decadent, is turning inward, more coercive, more nationalist, and more dangerous.
