Our correspondent met with the great Iranian director to get his thoughts on political cinema, what it means to go back behind the camera, and what gets lost in translation.

Edward Frumkin

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

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

Notes Toward a Theory of Inflation

Why do people raise prices?

Price Pressures

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

How They Paid for the War

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

The Ideology of Growth and its Origins

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

What Should Money Be Made From?

And who should have the power to create it?

Wobbly Economics – Part I

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

Do Interest Rate Hikes Worsen Inflation?

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

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

Nationalists and Ethnic Minorities in Poland

What happens when great powers redraw the map?

Hope and Contradictions: My Year in Rojava

Our correspondent spent a year living in North-East Syria. These are his first reflections on the experience.

Social Movements

Casa Against Campesino

Libertarian socialists played a key role in the Mexican Revolution – and its betrayal

Walking Zirgan

Turkish war crimes on Rojava’s front line

The Double Counterinsurgency

How an American tradition of popular sovereignty gave way to COINTELPRO with a ‘progressive’ face

Culture, High & Low

Retro Shock

When the world's a cyberpunk dystopia, where does the genre go next?

Well That Doesn’t Sound Like Fun

On boredom, board games, and Debord

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...

All Futon