All articles filed in Reviews

Matt Hartman reviews Destin Jenkins’s The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, out from the University of Chicago Press, which explores how bond structures shaped cities and allowed financiers to profit from poverty.

Alexander Billet reviews The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, out from Pluto Press. The essay collection surveys the SI’s origins, theories, and role in May ’68, reevaluating the movement in light of new scholarship.

Shane Burley has a glowing review of Andy Ngo’s new book, in which Ngo’s overheated accusations attain an impressive degree of incoherence.

Matt Hartman reviews “Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us,” upcoming from Verso Books. A translation of the debut novel from French author Joseph Andras, the narrative traces the life and trial of executed saboteur Fernand Iveton.

by Amelia Merrill. Socialism was not a niche part of Keller’s life, but the crux of it. As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, she called for nationwide workers’ strikes and revolution, bemoaning that her fans and benefactors wanted to sanitize her image.

by Saritha Ramakrishna. In the foreword to Welcome to Hell World, Luke O’Neil admits that he does not know what his book is. It covers a lot: loneliness and addiction in all their forms, absurdity and cruelty and how they’re often paired together, people as soft matter shredded by this nation’s exploitative system.

by Shane Burley. Everyone was covering their eyes as we headed into 2020, a year that feels like the worst confluence of global disasters, neoliberal fraud, and far-right advances. Which makes it feel serendipitous that the punk band Anti-Flag, which has made its opposition to the U.S. war machine its operating principle for its almost thirty years of existence, is releasing a new album for the election year.

by Jimmy Wu. Class is back on the big screen. From Sorry to Bother You to Joker, the past year has seen an explosion of popular movies that offer, with varying degrees of coherence, a critique of contemporary capitalism. But perhaps no recent film does so with more savvy than Parasite, a new genre-bender that became the first Korean movie to win the Palme d’Or.

by Ash Jarrow. ‘Scary Stories’ is set in a past haunted by the Vietnam War, made for adults haunted by eternal remixes of their youth, and aimed at a future straining to reconcile the ghosts of its past. The film winds up nostalgic for a past no one experienced. It’s a product of a larger struggle to imagine our way out of an absent future.

by Abby Cartus. For as much as Health Justice Now is about the machinations of health finance and the details of single-payer, it’s also a book about health as a function of power. It’s a book about a society that makes us sick, then punishes, scams, and profits off of us for it.