Private Life Drama
Soviet writer Andrei Platonov’s Happy Moscow finds the shortcomings of socialism not in its crushing the individual spirit but timidly preserving it.
Not for Prophet
Who’s mad about The Weather Channel’s original programming?
When Lovers Die
Michael Haneke’s Amour isn’t an ironically titled film about entropy, acrimony, withering, or divorce. It's about storybook romance and true love. And just like true love, it's filled with violence, horror, and death.
TNI Vol. 12 Editorial Note: Hail or High Water
Everybody talks about the weather —“but nobody ever does anything about it,” jokes Charles Dudley Warner. Everybody talks about it, Ulrike Meinhof repeats, but "we don’t.”
Magical Surpluses
What if abundance really is your destiny?
Scenes Resembling Civil War
Before there was the cancer of Occupy, there were the German Autonomen, street-fighting anarchists who battled riot police through the 80s. A new translation of Fire and Flames, a history of the struggle, shines a light on this proto-Black Bloc.
Dissatisfaction City
The Las Vegas casino is a machine for social control that works not through repression but deinhibition, rationalizing our yearning for the expensive and impossible
Natural's Not In It
How do you make a food fad appeal to libertarians? Invoke human nature.
Seeing Red
Despite the bleak imaginary landscape of food deserts, urban nutritional politics is all about color.
Line Cooked
Sustainable food makes no sense when restaurants pay only sustenance wages
Not the One
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem broke with his mentor Alain Badiou in an act of philosophical parricide. But is the father dead?
All The Hungry Children
To sell sympathy for starvation, Live Aid and its successors have started using the latest in branding innovation
Milton Friedman’s Pencil
Why has pencil making proved a seductive metaphor for spontaneous order?
Soft Rebellion
Han Han's half a billion blog followers include liberals who hope the acerbic young rebel will grow more brave or serious. But Han Han parries with equal parts modesty, disdain and defeat.
Dark Pages
In the years since his death, not even literature has been able to countenance colonial whistle-blower and traitor to the crown Roger Casement's affinity for penises
Sowing Scarcity
In capitalism’s inverted world, scarcity grows on trees while resources are blithely wasted