All articles filed in Reviews

Adam Fales reviews Olga Ravn’s The Employees: a slyly oblique sci-fi novel that transposes the alienation of the capitalist workplace onto a 22nd-century commercial starship.

Two docu-series, “Exterminate All the Brutes” and “How to Become a Tyrant,” exemplify a “poetic” materialism and stale liberal idealism, respectively. Ilan Benattar holds them both up to the light.

Clinton Williamson reviews Bini Adamczak’s Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future, from MIT Press.

Will Meyer, with an eye to Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders and Todd Miller’s Empire of Borders, examines how U.S. policing and repressive tactics are exported to and tested in client states, and how they inevitably return home.

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.

Sohel Sarkar reviews Harsha Walia’s essential book, Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, which critiques both the far-right demonization of migrants and liberal responses that trade shallow multiculturalism for justice.

Adam Fleming Petty reviews Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.

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.