With the Trump administration’s backing down on its tariffs on China, its military abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, its insistence on seizing Greenland one way or another, its bombings in Nigeria, and its declaration that the official U.S. military budget will be increased by 50 percent in 2027—the last four events occurring in a two-week span in late December and early January—establishment commentators are all over the map.
Vijay Prashad critiques the argument that colonialism was, at most, ancillary to the transition between capitalism and feudalism in Western Europe. Instead, Prashad argues, “capitalism as it historically emerged—industrial, global, racialized, and imperial—was inseparable from colonial expropriation.” This reality must fuel a Marxist conception of the global struggle for reparations for those who have been oppressed and exploited at the hands of empires past and present.
In this dual review, Paul Buhle lends contemporary context to the histories of McCarthyism found in the recently published A Blacklist Education, by Jane S. Smith, and Operation Mind, by Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Donovan. In these two books, Buhle writes, readers can find parallels with the was that is today being waged against university professors and students for political activities—a stark reminder that political witch-hunts did not end with Joe McCarthy.
Craig Medlen dissects the logic behind the Trump administration’s efforts to impose tariffs as a way to counteract “unfair” U.S. trade deficits. Situating these deficits in the longer history of U.S. trade hegemony and its crumbling position in the global economy, Medlen uses incontrovertible data to illustrate how mainstream economic orthodoxy fails to acknowledge the effects of foreign inputs that integral to the workings of U.S. monopoly capital.
In A House for Miss Pauline, the Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay examines her family’s shadowy history by telling the story of a woman who builds her house with the remains of the manor of a former slave plantation.
Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid.
What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.
Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place by Dan Chiasson
President Trump’s reversal of a ban on sales of advanced semiconductors to China undercut the strategic logic behind years of American policy that was meant to keep the US ahead in the race to develop AI systems.
The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China by Ya-Wen Lei
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt
The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim
Here’s a question I often bat around with graduate students in my International Political Economy seminar: In book 12 of the Odyssey, how do the shipmates know which Ulysses to trust?
You know the story. Ulysses and his crew have been on Circe’s island for a year. They’re finally about to depart when the goddess takes Ulysses aside and warns him of the dangers that await them. The first of these is the “piercing songs” of the Sirens. “So listen,” she says, “I will give you good instructions; another god will make sure you remember.”
Circe tells Ulysses to put wax in his sailors’ ears but that he can listen to the Sirens if he wants to — as long as his shipmates bind him “hand and foot” to the mast: “So bound, you can enjoy the Sirens’ song. But if you beg your men to set you free, they have to tie you down with firmer knots.”
As their ship approaches the Sirens’ sharp rocks, the wind dies down, they pull the sails, and they begin to row. As predicted, Ulysses yells out to his men to set him free. He is still their captain. But instead of obeying his orders, Eurylochus and Perimedes stand up and “tie him down with firmer knots.” How, I ask my students, do they know to trust the first Ulysses over the second? How is it that as readers, we never question their choice?
Albert Kahn has been called “the father of industrial architecture” and “the architect of Detroit.” His firm was certainly prolific: it was responsible for the Ford Motor Company of Canada factory in Toronto, near a laneway that bears his name, and the General Motors assembly plant in Regina, along with nearly 900 buildings in Motor City alone. Kahn’s oeuvre encompassed offices, grand homes for his industrialist clients, and libraries and fraternity houses at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, not to mention a post office, a synagogue, and multiple hospitals and skyscrapers. Many of Kahn’s buildings reflect a pastiche of styles that might be considered a precursor of a postmodern eclectic. Yet this prolific architect is relatively unknown today, especially outside of Michigan.
Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry, 1905–1961 by Claire Zimmerman
The mood on the Sea Adventurer’s bridge was grim. “She’s only making eight knots,” said our expedition leader. “We need to hit at least fourteen to keep to our itinerary.” We were four days into a two-week sailing and anchored off Ilulissat, near a UNESCO World Heritage site nestled into the crenellated western coast of Greenland.
Earlier that day, I had found myself at the helm of a Zodiac, manoeuvring the rubberized craft through thick fog, near-freezing water, and growlers. The ten high-paying passengers under my care likely had no idea that this was my first trip with the tour operator or my first time north of the Arctic Circle.
The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force.
A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.
Boomers Daily 