Category Archives: All

New York has an office space problem, a glut. It also has a retail store problem: empty units standing out like missing teeth. Those gaps are everywhere in town, especially in Manhattan, glaring cavities. Recently, I decided I wanted to … Continue reading →

There’s something about urban crowds, about hordes of people in the city, in public. There’s nothing like it, never will be. I miss it. I miss being amongst people, lots of them. After months of lockdowns and isolations, I know … Continue reading →

100 years ago, in Paris, February 2nd, James Joyce celebrated his fortieth birthday by raising a glass (or two…) to Ulysses, his great epic novel, launched into the world in all its full, if later revised, glory, that same day–this very … Continue reading →

When I heard the geographer Clive Barnett had passed away on Christmas Eve, it took me a while to reconcile that it was the Clive Barnett who’d died, the Clive Barnett I hadn’t seen for many years yet whom I … Continue reading →

 Guy Debord has been dead twenty-seven years today. In Panegyric, his elegiac autobiography, the author of The Society of the Spectacle famously said that more than anything else his life had been marked by the habit of drinking, by consuming … Continue reading →

Driving forty-five minutes from my home, I can get to Bellevue-la-Montagne, a sleepy, semi-abandoned village, perched at 990 metres in France’s Haute-Loire. It was twenty-years ago when I first discovered Bellevue. I’d just stepped off a plane then, from New … Continue reading →

This blog was published at Monthly Review Online on Jun 13, 2021 Since the October Revolution, Marxism has experienced almost as many crises as capitalism itself. Crises are Marxism’s bread and butter, if not its chalk and cheese. Meltdowns of capitalism usually … Continue reading →

  This essay was originally posted at Monthly Review Online on 28th March 2021  Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1970) quietly celebrated its 50th birthday under lockdown, and our greatest ever urban revolution, the Paris Commune (1871), just toasted its 150th. … Continue reading →

Today, 212-years ago, on April Fool’s Day, the writer Nikolai Gogol was born in the Ukraine. As his birthdate might suggest, Gogol was never a man to miss an opportunity to joke, and in this essay I pay homage to … Continue reading →

On the mornings when I used to walk my daughter to school, years gone by now, we would pass by a little pub called “The Prince Albert,” along a narrow old lane, near the town centre, by the cathedral. On … Continue reading →