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.
Blog
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.