Category Archives: All

Just as mainstream politics plumbs the depths, this year’s Golden Jubilee of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude helps radical politics soar. With spellbinding brilliance both books continue to fascinate … Continue reading →

There’s awe-inspiring immensity down there. I’m looking out over Mexico City, from thirty-six floors up in the sky, a recumbent giant right before me, shimmering in glorious February sunshine. It’s a miracle I’m here, shacked up in this lux hotel … Continue reading →

This essay first appeared in Review 31 on 24th January 2017 Storytellers, the late John Berger was wont to say, are ‘Death’s Secretaries’: they borrow their authority from the dead. Death hands storytellers the file, ‘full of sheets of uniformly black … Continue reading →

2017 marks the Golden Jubilee of Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City, his “cry and demand” for a more participatory and democratic city life. It’s a cause both to celebrate and commiserate. But celebration and commiseration have typically been part … Continue reading →

A tribute to John Berger, who passed away aged 90 on 2 January 2017. Posted originally on Verso Books blog, 3 January 2017. John died yesterday. I’ll remember his voice, his laugh, his charm and generosity. His words. Stripped-down words, … Continue reading →

This essay offers another take on debates about planetary urbanisation—or “planétarisation de l’urbain,” as philosopher-urbanist Henri Lefebvre calls it. I will come back to why I think he calls it that later on. Before then, I want to start out … Continue reading →

One of my all-time favourite essays on “amateur reason” is by the French poet Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life, published in 1863. Funnily enough, this set piece of art criticism has been celebrated for many things, especially as … Continue reading →

Since my late teens, I’ve had a penchant for Russian literature. It started with Dostoevsky. It may have been because we were both clerks—Dostoevsky’s “underground man,” that is, he’d been a clerk, too, a petty clerk in the Russian civil … Continue reading →