№ 2026.Aug.21-002
OpenAI cut its cheapest model by 80 percent, and the official blog calls it "advancing the price-performance frontier." But this site said it once before: when the leader itself starts a price war, it has admitted that frontier migration can no longer open a wide enough gap. This is not progress. It is the sound of the treadmill accelerating.
№ 2026.Aug.21-003
Twenty years of craft, one screwdriver, three furniture jobs, eleven hours, about $120 net. Algorithmic dispatch, customer ratings, the platform's cut — the platform did not invent gig work. What it invented was a system that makes gig work measurable and exploitable.
№ 2026.Aug.21-004
Sam Altman invited Dave Eggers into OpenAI headquarters, before some two hundred employees. Eggers did not bring compliments. ChatGPT, he said, is stealing the voice of an entire generation. This is not another warning about jobs — it is a warning about whether people will still think.
№ 2026.Jul.14-001
Timothy Mitchell says that capital is not saved out of the past but captured from the future. In NLR 159, Copley takes this thesis apart for you — Uber lives not on innovation but on the expectation of monopoly; the valuations of the stock market are not an index of productivity but a plan for the plunder of the future.
№ 2026.Jul.14-002
Debray has written a memoir that crosses from the twentieth century into the twenty-first. To be French today, he says, is a little like being the Cheshire Cat — the smile remains, the cat is gone. Eight metamorphoses, one thread: after the future has receded, what is left of a civilization?
№ 2026.Jul.14-003
Rahel Jaeggi has written a book that tries to salvage the concept of "progress" without smuggling in any standard of value. In NLR 159, Ebner-Landy says: the philosophical reasoning is admirable, but the goal is unmet — you show the norm out the front door and smuggle it back in through the rear.
№ 2026.Jul.14-004
In *Homeland*, Richard Beck argues that the war on terror is not a betrayal of American values but their expression. In NLR 159, Mertes highlights its most insightful strand — that domestic police violence and overseas military violence are one and the same project — but also faults it for underestimating the autonomy of geopolitics and ideology. The war on terror is not a war that needs to be ended; it is a permanent building that will not dismantle itself.
№ 2026.Jul.14-005
Jonathan Levy has written an epic history of American capitalism arguing that the profit motive has never been sufficient to drive long-term development. In NLR 159, Moreno Zacarés says: the instinct is right but the foundations are unsound — you take Keynes's theory of hoarding as the skeleton and fill in the flesh with a Smithian commercial narrative, and the two pull each other apart.
№ 2026.Jul.11-001
In Monthly Review, Patnaik renders a two-sided diagnosis of capitalism's current crisis: neoliberalism has manufactured a dead end of stagnation, and every exit is sealed off by finance capital. Neo-fascism is one symptom; Trump's "re-colonization" is another — neither solves anything, but both lay bare a deeper structural predicament.
№ 2026.Jul.11-002
Nancy Fraser had her professorship revoked by the University of Cologne because she refused to publicly retract her criticism of Israel. She turned the experience into a diagnosis of a "world event" — Gaza is not merely a regional conflict; it is a mirror, and in it Germany and the United States see the true face of their own "philosemitic McCarthyism."
№ 2026.Jul.11-003
"Abolish the police" became a fashionable slogan of the American left after 2020. In NLR 158, Wacquant says: your motives I understand, but your program is hollow. Abolitionism is philosophically seductive, sociologically untenable, and politically a dead end — and the communities it would harm most deeply are precisely those most opposed to it.
№ 2026.Jul.11-004
A man who came to power on "no more stupid wars" has launched the war against Iran that the neoconservatives always dreamed of. In NLR 158, Zevin sets this war back into history — from the farce of Napoleon III to the cautionary precedents of the two Gulf Wars, from the myth of air power to market manipulation become reason of state.
№ 2026.Jul.10-001
The left loves to mock the impotence of international law — the UN can't discipline the United States, the International Court of Justice is a paper tiger. In NLR 154, Koskenniemi says: you've been looking in the wrong place. The law that truly rules the world was never in those halls you can see.
№ 2026.Jul.09-001
Every few years the left holds a funeral for neoliberalism. The ideology is indeed rotting, the policies have changed their face, but Sperber is right in NLR 158 — the coffin is empty. The layer that decides who eats meat and who drinks soup hasn't been touched at all.