A Soundtrack for Progress
For veteran music critic Simon Reynolds, the “avant-lumpen” sound captures how it feels to be alive today with raw voices and synthetic soundscapes.
20378 Article(s) by: Enver Motala
Enver Motala is an associate of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg and of the Centre for Integrated Post-School Education and Training at the Nelson Mandela University.
Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn
Yesterday Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, oversaw the imprisonment of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. In jailing his political rival, Erdoğan has joined a global club of authoritarian leaders unwilling to tolerate challengers of any kind.
Welcome to Everytown
The sci-fi film Things to Come debuted just before World War II. It was all too prophetic in its portrait of a society destroyed and then rebuilt by advanced technology.
Veni, Vidi, Vici
How Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s mournful portrait of Rome shaped the Enlightenment’s understanding of progress.
Bellamy and Morris’s Dueling Utopias
How two socialist science-fiction bestsellers invited nineteenth-century readers into a grand debate about progress.
Stop the Music!
A brief catalog of genre-changing moments in music history.
Musk Looks to the Motherland
The billionaire is fueling a global panic about the fate of white South Africans and misrepresenting the real problems that plague his home country.
Mine for the Taking
Niger has the opportunity to nationalize the uranium industry. Will it?
“We Didn’t Have Anywhere to Go”
As Azerbaijan reclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh, its Armenian population faced a devastating choice: flee or risk death.
Greenland Is Not for Sale
The people of Greenland don’t want to be subjects of Denmark or the United States — they want economic independence and freedom from foreign control.
Build, Baby, Build!
Two decades of unprecedented infrastructure investments transformed China. Then the country hit a wall of debt.
Donald Trump in Palestine
The US president ran as an antiwar candidate. Now he wants to use American muscle to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.
That Hopey, Changey Stuff
Obama’s presidency promised a new era in America, but the failure of his landmark legislation, the Affordable Care Act, set the stage for today’s disillusionment.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost Mourned a Revolution Betrayed
Blind, alone, and reeling from the failures of the English Revolution, Milton wrote an epic reflection on political defeat and the possibility of hope.
Eugenics and the Welfare State
Swedish social democracy’s relationship to eugenics is a reminder that socialist planning requires a bedrock commitment to human dignity.
Turn On, Tune In, Cash Out
In the 1960s, psychedelics seemed to promise social progress. Today their proponents are all about self-optimization under capitalism.
Donald Trump’s Reactionary Futurism
Like its twentieth-century predecessors, today’s far right longs for the purported glories of the ancient world, all while fetishizing modern technology.
Make Europe Productive Again
The EU has been trailing the US economically for decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic only made its situation worse. Does Mario Draghi hold the secret to restoring Europe’s productivity?
Guyana’s Blessing and Curse
The tiny nation has discovered the world’s largest per capita oil reserves. What does the bonanza mean for its future?