The Latest
The Path to the Trump Doctrine
From Syria to Lebanon to Gaza, the coercion central to the new regime has been incubated in the Middle East.
Socialism in One City
The ultimate test for Mamdani’s vision will be successful governance—and so far, it appears to be working.
Renee Good’s Murder and Other Acts of Terror
An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley on how to think about ICE—and the broader history of police violence.
Empire of Vice
In a perverse twist on virtue signaling, the Trump administration is training Americans in the politics of raw domination.
Baghdad’s Blank Slate
The massive development projects the Iraqi government has planned for the city seem designed to wipe it clean of its past memories.
A Good Neighbor
The late Marcel Ophuls made films about the twentieth century’s great crimes—and the trail of guilt they left behind.
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Celebrating 50 years of Boston Review
“
Grumbach and Collier’s essay challenges and deepens our intuitions. Unions were vehicles for the expansion of democratic rights and the articulation of shared material interests, they argue; those unions’ decline has fragmented working-class politics in ways Trump and his predecessors have exploited.
—Osita Nwavenu, columnist at The Guardian and contributing editor at The New Republic, on Jake Grumbach and Ruth Berins Collier’s “The Deep Structure of Democratic Crisis” (2022)
Forums
“The whole point of socialist politics is to make state power and state capacity explicit in a way that liberals have long eschewed.”
—David Austin Walsh, “Socialism in One City”
“Cities with well-organized resistance to ICE have histories of police violence that rivals anything ICE agents are doing.”
—“Renee Good’s Murder and Other Acts of Terror,” an interview with Robin D. G. Kelley
“When one vice signals, the out-group’s values take center stage—in order to be shirked rather than lived up to. The moral commitments of the in-group are basically irrelevant: all that matters is owning the enemy.”
—Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò “Empire of Vice”
“Architecture, the victors came to realize, is a remedy for a shaken coalition to overcome its own impotence.”
—Nabil Salih, “Baghdad’s Blank Slate”
The Return of Regime Change
Empire’s Racketeers
Wajahat Ali speaks with Pankaj Mishra on the devastating consequences of Western imperialism, globalization, and capitalism and the fate of liberal democracy.
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