All articles filed in Critique & Essays

On the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul, we’re publishing the epilogue of Combat Trauma, by Nadia Abu El-Haj, out from Verso Books. El-Haj writes on the incalculable cost of the War on Terror—on this country’s jingoism, its willful ignorance, and its refusal to acknowledge its crimes.

Zoé Samudzi reflects on the ambivalent figure of her great-uncle, the Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was briefly Prime Minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Despite his own best intentions, Muzorewa would be dismissed by posterity as a Black collaborator with a white apartheid government—though the truth is more nuanced.

Amid reflections on his time booking shows in NYC, Jon Ben-Menachem envisions new means of protecting communities in music venues and cultural events—and remaking a troubled industry.

Tad DeLay writes on the futility of carbon offset programs. The exaggerated promises of carbon sequestration allow corporations like Delta Airlines, BP, and Tesla to make absurd claims of neutrality and launder ever-worsening emissions.

John Favini interrogates the assumptions implicit in the notion of an “invasive species.” The narrow concept muddles the real factors behind environmental crises and exonerates profit-seeking human activity.

Through a first-person lens, Angeli Lacson evaluates the position of the disabled subject, in Filipino society and worldwide—the unique dissonance of being suddenly rendered “less-than” while negotiating a radical change in the relationship to one’s body.

Republished here is an excerpt from Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion. Out from Verso, it’s a lucid examination of economic domination, which, Mau argues, constitutes an independent structural force shaping the context of for subjects and capitalists alike.

Havana Syndrome, Evan Malmgren writes, may be a hoax, but militaries have long been captivated by the idea of directed energy weapons. Even if Cuba isn’t using them to give headaches to diplomats, the thought that they might may be the weapons’ greatest purpose.

Energy researcher Nishikant Sheorey provides this primer on the field of degrowth: what it is, what it is not, and what its critics on the left get wrong. Far from being analogous to “austerity,” degrowth is instead deeply aligned with anti-capitalist values.

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.