Homepage - Strange Matters

Recent Online Articles

Essequibo, or the Persistence of El Dorado

The origins and meaning of the conflict involving Venezuela and Guyana

Why does the socialist president of Venezuela want to invade socialist-run Guyana? The answer lies in a long, grim history of gold, oil, and inter-imperial rivalry.

Back Pages Online Reviews

The Hero as a Drifting Shadow

The latest novel by the mysterious Joseph Andras gathers traces of Ho Chi Minh’s pre-revolutionary youth

Jim Henderson

Front Pages Online Social Movements

The Double Counterinsurgency

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

Johnny Tran

Back Pages Online Reviews

Love in the Age of Cronenberg

Only now is the world ready for the queer, kinky idea of love in David Cronenberg's films

C.M. Crockford

Front Pages Online Social Movements

Notes on Labor Notes

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

Riley Gombis

From Issue 3

Futon Issue 3

Two New Albums by Sufjan Stevens!

Beverly Hills, CA | USA

Mehrzad Farnoosh

Futon Issue 3

QUALITY Copper Ingots!

The City of Ur | Iraq

Ea Nasir

Futon Issue 3

The Dialectic of Chess Story

New York, New York | USA

Thomas Hobohm

Front Pages Issue 3 Letters

Reply to “Consider the Dinosaur”

Bill Marcy

SUBSCRIBE

Or login for full access

Price Pressures

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

Alex Vuocolo

Political Economy & Planning

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

Notes Toward a Theory of Inflation

Why do people raise prices?

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?

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

Editorials

Socialism with an Anarchist Squint

Authoritarian creep, libertarian socialism, & democratic planning

An assemblage of colorful, elementary, 3D shapes.

Words for our Present Reality

A Modest Proposal for a New and Living Ontology

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

An Historiography of Anarchism

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

The Native Freedom Struggle

An interview with Roberto Mendoza, a veteran of Indigenous people’s struggle for liberation in North America

My McUnion

A fast-food worker learns unionization tactics while working to organize their restaurant

Culture, High & Low

Barry Jenkins’s Cinematic Technique

A formal analysis of If Beale Street Could Talk

A Specter Hangs Over the Hamptons Couch

Inside the Outsider Art fair

The Ideology of Growth and its Origins

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

Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter

The Ideology of Growth and its Origins

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

Front Pages

Editorials Front Pages Issue 3

Can Technology Save Us?

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

The Editors

Light bulb cartels, technocratic cults, world-wide web, world-ending nukes: would a socialism that takes tech seriously be for it or against it?

Owner’s Remorse

Blockchain elites believe everyone deserves a stake in the internet. Will we all be equal stakeholders in Web3?

All Front Pages

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig is the perfect Christmas gift. It’s short enough to read in one sitting and its prose is practically see-through. Every year, I’m tempted to give my copy to a friend, adorned with a handwritten note on the inside flap. But I never will. It’s too...