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Finding Mike Davis in L.A., Part II: Memories of Santa Monica with Matthew Specktor
Samuel McIlhagga traveled to Los Angeles to interview L.A. figures influenced by Mike Davis and to seek out geographical touchstones from Davis’s seminal title City of Quartz—revisiting the same streets, buildings, and social maladies that the writer memorably documented. Part II comprises an interview with novelist Matthew Specktor.
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Finding Mike Davis in L.A., Part I: On the Road with Peter Chesney
Samuel McIlhagga traveled to Los Angeles to interview L.A. figures influenced by Mike Davis and to seek out geographical touchstones from Davis’s seminal title City of Quartz—revisiting the same streets, buildings, and social maladies that the writer memorably documented. Part I comprises interviews with historian Peter Chesney.
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Uprising and Counter-Attack: Vincent Bevins on If We Burn
Samuel McIlhagga spoke with Vincent Bevins on his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution—on resurgent global protest and its receding tide, co-option and counter-revolution, and more.
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Cold War Liberalism: An Interview with Samuel Moyn
How did liberalism become warped from utopian, mass-democratic values into paranoid, defensive neoliberalism? Samuel McIlhagga interviews Samuel Moyn on his new book, which answers: the Cold War.
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Imagine a New Collectivism: An Interview with Adam Curtis
Samuel McIlhagga sat down with filmmaker Adam Curtis for a discussion of his new series, “TraumaZone, 1985-1999″—and had a wide-ranging conversation about his work, truth, lies, and journalism, dueling Ends of History, and more.
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Jean-Luc Godard: On Prophecy and Pastiche
Samuel McIlhagga with remarks on the life and work of seminal French New Wave filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard, who died in September. Godard’s engagement with the political, however capricious, has been overshadowed by contemporary aestheticization of his work.
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The Disenchanted Earth: An Interview with Richard Seymour
Samuel McIlhagga interviews Richard Seymour, author of The Disenchanted Earth, on socialism and degrowth, the ecofascist threat, and envisioning a planetary, humanist “re-enchantment.”
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The Road to Brighton Pier: Class, Caste, and the British Left
With an eye to Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Samuel McIlhagga writes on the class codes of British diction and the incestuous tangle of the U.K. elite, who preside over a hidebound power structure and decaying institutions.
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Interview: Tariq Ali on Afghanistan
Samuel McIlhagga spoke to Tariq Ali about his new essay collection on Afghanistan, the country’s history, and the devastation of the occupation.
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Towards Neo-Statism: Paolo Gerbaudo’s The Great Recoil
Samuel McIlhagga reviews Paolo Gerbaudo’s The Great Recoil, out from Verso Books. Gerbaudo’s book posits a shift to protective statism in response to amassing crises.
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