Issue Five

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Letters ~ Mason's Critique

John Michael Colón ~ Our Idiot Overlords

Kyle Flannery ~ America is at War – with DEI

Ben Wray ~ Gorilla Marketing

Sajad Hameed & Rehan Qayoom ~ Kashmir's Line of Control

Isabel Pabán Freed ∙ Sue Chehrenegar ∙ Corvus Arthur

Evan Lambert ∙ Selen Ozturk

Rose Novick & Zhuangzi ~ It's a Bird! It's a Fish! It's – Limitless!

Martin Dolan ~ The Death of Indie Games and the Rise of Friendslop

Kate Wagner ~ Architecture Biennale Post-Mortem

Clement Gelly ~ Prestidigitated Vegas

Stephanie Niu ~ Poetry: Glass & Sea Studies

Featured Issue Five

Back Pages Issue 5 Reviews

The Absence of the Future

At the Venice Biennale, architecture has no vision of the future but gadgets, gimmicks, and climate doom

Kate Wagner

The Venice Bienale this year was a vortex of oligarch-funded tech boosterism and empty spectacle. Kate Wagner breaks it down.

Futon Issue 5

The After Work Coffee

San Francisco, CA | USA

Isabel Pabán Freed

Back Pages Issue 5 Poetry

Recent Online Articles

Back Pages Online

Applying a New Foundation, Geopolitically

What the spread of East Asia’s beauty trends reveals about the region’s soft power influence.

Chinon Norteman

Front Pages Online Reporting Social Movements

The March of the Breeders

In Bulgaria, Sofia Pride is under siege from domestic reactionaries and DOGE cuts alike – but they’re fighting back

Evan E. Lambert

Bored Women

The ennui, the humor, the horror, the canon of women's boredom in literature

The Ballad of Glanton Dowdell

An excerpt from The Black Utopians

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The Absence of the Future

At the Venice Biennale, architecture has no vision of the future but gadgets, gimmicks, and climate doom

Kate Wagner

Do Interest Rate Hikes Worsen Inflation?

Central bankers want to pull on one lever to lower prices; history shows this might raise them

What Should Money Be Made From?

And who should have the power to create it?

The Ideology of Growth and its Origins

Our growth fetish has its roots in material and cultural transformations; so too will degrowth

Wobbly Economics – Part I

Why Frederic S Lee was the greatest economist you’ve never heard of

How They Paid for the War

Social democrats should fight climate change the way we fought the Axis Powers

Price Pressures

It's people who set prices; let's ask them how and why they do it

Notes Toward a Theory of Inflation

Why do people raise prices?

Editorials

Can Technology Save Us?

The Left’s wires are crossed about technology. We hack away at the Gordian knot.

Socialism with an Anarchist Squint

Authoritarian creep, libertarian socialism, & democratic planning

Reporting

Between Flood and Famine

In Mozambique, the green transition comes up against corruption and imperialism

Nationalists and Ethnic Minorities in Poland

What happens when great powers redraw the map?

Social Movements

Notes on Labor Notes

Between compromise and radicalism, on the job and at the Labor Notes conference

An Historiography of Anarchism

Global anarchist history reveals the fundamental unity of the tradition, along with its key lines of debate and disagreement

Searching For a Pulse

We talk to Shift Change, who are fighting for more democracy in National Nurses United

Culture, High & Low

Well That Doesn’t Sound Like Fun

On boredom, board games, and Debord

The Importance of Being Hermes

The occult spiritual practice of Oscar Wilde

Barry Jenkins’s Cinematic Technique

A formal analysis of If Beale Street Could Talk

Nimble Conveyances

Conversations with Las Vegas magicians

Clement Gelly

The Ideology of Growth and its Origins

Our growth fetish has its roots in material and cultural transformations; so too will degrowth

Editorials Front Pages Issue 5

What is the DOGE?

The debt, the DOGE, and the crisis of competence in an era of rising “national conservatism”

John Michael Colón

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the total loss of economic planning knowledge.

Why Racists Lose Wars

History is full of ethnically divided armies. A recent study quantifies their disastrous track record.

Border Economies, Broken Lives

In Kashmir, a chaos of trade, smuggling, and surveillance shapes the “cold peace” between India and Pakistan

All Front Pages

Since Jon stopped answering his door I’m digging to his house. I started a year ago. Soon after, we started up again as less than partners. Now there’s nothing where that less was. He said I’m intense. Digging is less intense than stalking, which I did first. I stopped because...

Little Pumpkins

Lima | Peru

Do celebrities ever think about how much we think about them? Does Jacob Elordi ever wonder, during Leg Day, how many teenagers are drawing heart eyes over a photo of him at that very moment? Does Sean Bean get an unexplained prickly sensation in his belly every time another “One...

The After Work Coffee

San Francisco, CA | USA

Many other coffees are bitter with the taste of necessity – not the after work coffee: it’s the one you drink because you want to. Free time – who doesn’t love it? Your existence is certainly better spent at a beloved local establishment, enjoying a vibe forward, coffee purveying, and...

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