№ 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.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.11-002
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.11-001
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.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.