The Impossible Film
In the late 1920s, the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein made notes for a dream project: Das Kapital, the film.
Blog
Selling Settlement
Real estate developers make massive profits off Israeli land seizures — and encourage brazen settlement building deep in the West Bank.
Holy Profits
The mirage of Islamic banking.
Gambling on the Green Transition
The EU’s market for carbon credits is still a market — and it’s plagued by fraud and speculation.
A Sweatshop in Your Pocket
Crypto-based video games like Axie Infinity are no fun for the Filipinos who play them for a living.
Japanese Pop’s Secret Utopians
Bright, ironic, and tuneful, Yellow Magic Orchestra provided the soundtrack to Japan’s bubble economy in the 1980s. But the band’s work also contained hidden depths and the memories of East Asia’s political struggles.
Where Will Canada’s Workers Go After the Election?
Nationalist backlash against Donald Trump helped stall right-wing populism. But Canadian workers are still drifting rightward, and the social democratic NDP is in shambles.
Rwanda’s Raiders
The linchpin of Rwanda’s booming mineral sector is the violent paramilitaries it finances in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Return of Decadent Conservatism
One of the most energetic factions of today’s Right flirts with monarchy, myth, and high-tech transcendence. Drawing on the anti-modern sensibility of the fin de siècle Decadents, they reject democracy and seek to use imagined pasts to shape the future.
The House Always Wins
The gaming industry is turning every smartphone into a casino — and it’s destroying more lives than ever.
The Crypto State
The Trump White House has helped install the ticking time bomb that is cryptocurrency directly into our economy. When it blows up, the damage will be catastrophic.
We Have Always Lived in the Casino
John Maynard Keynes warned that when real investment becomes the by-product of speculation, the result is often disaster. But it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.