Robert Brenner: The Boom and the Bubble
In the last four years, the US economy has posted its best performance since the sixties. What is the
connexion between the formidable boom in the real economy and the historically unprecedented bubble on
the stock market? Could the inflation of asset values far beyond the rise in corporate earnings be preparing
a Japanese-style nemesis?
Edward Said: America's Last Taboo
The Palestinian uprising and the blackout of its human and geographical realities
by the US media. Edward Said looks at the power of the Zionist lobby in American public life, and warns of the fatal blindness of the
PLO and Arab world towards it.
David Chandler: 'International Justice'
Every military expedition by the West now dons the mantle of human rights.
What happens to international law when justice is the name of power? The charade of NATO's tribunal in The Hague.
Wang Hui: Fire at the Castle Gate
The Chinese intellectual scene has been transformed by the emergence of a New
Left. Its leading theorist explains how and why the neo-liberal consensus of the
early nineties broke down, and considers what a radical agenda should look like as social and political problems mount.
Ronald Dore: Worldwide Anglo-Saxon Capitalism?
A decade ago, German and Japanese capitalism were widely held superior in economic performance and
social cohesion to American or British. Now the stockmarket-based, deregulated US/UK model has the
upper hand in market competition. Will it force all other societies to conform to its rules? Ronald Dore
doubts it.
Peter Wollen: Blue
An elegy for Derek Jarman, meditating on the meanings of the monochrome he took from Yves Klein for
his last film, confronting death. From lapis lazuli to ultramarine: shades of paradise from Ficino and Blake
to Goethe and Guy Debord.
Sven L�tticken: Media and Mythology
From Lessing to Greenberg, criticism of the arts was founded on the distinctions made between them. Does
technology today irreversibly ruin these? Sven L�tticken asks what a radical practice that accepted
convergence between artistic media would look like.
Book Reviews
Peter Gowan on Jeffrey Johnson, ed., Selected Works of Juan Donoso Cort�s.
The prophetic insights of Spain's saturnine master of anti-socialist statecraft,
halfway through the nineteenth century.
Bruce Cumings on Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North
Korea, and
Helen-Louise Hunter, Kim Il Song's North Korea. The DPRK through Washington's telescope, and in its real
historical context in East Asian history.
Andy Merrifield on Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big
City. What are the
patterns, and what will be the consequences�social, cultural, political�of the massive influx of
immigrants from lands south of the Rio Grande into North American cityscapes?
