Contents:
• "The Corbyn Project," by Robin Blackburn: Given the imbalances of the UK economy—overblown financial sector, gaping current account, delirious levels of debt—what structural changes might a Corbyn government effect? Robin Blackburn discusses prospects and proposals for an egalitarian shift.
• "Meditations on a Corpse," by Simone Weil: Cool post-mortem on the 1936 Popular Front government in France, written while it was still technically alive. Centrality of consciousness and importance of timing, in politics as in music—and Machiavelli as a better guide than Marx.
• "Remaking Ramallah," by Kareem Rabie: From Arafat’s pharaonic tomb and Dubai-style luxury apartments to sweltering refugee camps and landless, beleaguered greater Ramallah as synecdoche for post-Oslo Palestine—and triumph for Israel’s fragmentation strategy.
• "To Freeze the Thames," by Troy Vettese: Are there hints of a solution to climate change in the Little Ice Age? Offering a critique of ‘steady-state’ ecological economics, green nuclear and artificial geo-engineering, Troy Vettese proposes the thought-experiment of a ‘half-earth’ agricultural land left to nature, egalitarian eco-austerity, green services and veganism.
• "Belated Reunion?" by Jiwei Xiao: One of China’s greatest modern writers, Eileen Chang reframed its traditional fictional forms to grapple with post-1919 decline of the Qing aristocracy, price of female emancipation, devastation of the Sino-Japanese war. Jiwei Xiao asks how publication of her long-suppressed last novel alters understandings of Chang’s work.
• "Rise and Fall of the Daily Paper," by Marco D'Eramo: The historical arc of print journalism, from its emergence as the instrument of a rising bourgeoisie through a twentieth-century heyday, buoyed by consumer advertising—and coming retreat to a subscription-only luxury market under the new oligarchy.
• "Yemen's Turn" Tariq Ali reviews Helen Lackner's Yemen in Crisis. A social anthropologist on the background to the 2011 uprising and devastating US–Saudi war.
• "A Critical Conformist" Alexander Zevin reviews Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Indictment—and illustration—of liberal complacencies.
• "Prometheus Wired" Leonardo Impett reviews Max Tegmark's Life 3.0. Symptomatic preview of a machine-run world from a mathematical cosmologist.