Reading

Created
Thu, 08/05/2025 - 22:00

In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives an evocative account of the relationship between his hometown and the heroic age of American industrial capitalism.1 The beating heart of Middletown, Ohio, was its steel plant, then called Armco. Vance […]

The post Forced Amnesia appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Created
Thu, 08/05/2025 - 22:00

Dear Mr. RFK Jr.,
(The “dear” is tradition. Don’t mistake it for affection.)

You said autistic children are a burden. That they ruin families. That they’ll never pay taxes or write poems. That they are, in essence, collateral damage.

I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.

She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.

When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.

She doesn’t write poems.

She is one.

Sometimes she says a single word like it holds the whole sky.

Created
Thu, 08/05/2025 - 20:44
The real triumph of the neoliberal international network was not its capture of the right, but its subsequent colonization of the parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested. The Democratic and Labour Party leaders who followed in Reagan and Thatcher’s wake did not possess a meaningful alternative to the neoliberal narrative. Rather than developing […]
Created
Thu, 08/05/2025 - 20:31

Eighty years ago today, the monstrous machinery of the Third Reich was finally ground to dust. The swastika was torn from the Reichstag, the death camps liberated, and Europe—bloodied, traumatised, but unbowed—emerged from history’s darkest night. It was not merely a military victory; it was the triumph of solidarity over fascism, of internationalism over racial […]

The post Some thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of Victory over Fascism appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Thu, 08/05/2025 - 16:49
The – Japanese asset price bubble – burst in spectacular fashion in late 1991 (early 1992) following five years in which the real estate and share market boomed beyond belief. The boom coincided with a period of over-the-top neoliberal relaxation of banking rules which encouraged wild speculation. The origins of the boom can be traced…