July 23, 2026
Astoria, this small clot of North Africa in the West, had naturally become the fan zone of choice.
Nationalism
July 16, 2026
Political Inertia
Palpable in the team’s vulnerable performance was a feeling that this tournament was going to be especially beleaguered
Thirty-one years after the birth of its democracy, South Africa remains plagued by the ghosts of colonization and Apartheid and continues to reproduce the same violence it sought to overcome.
June 30, 2026
From Mexico 1986 to North America 2026
For a few weeks, Mexico, not the United States, was the center of the world
The contours of the 2026 World Cup serve as a clear indicator of just how much the footballing relationship between Mexico and the United States has evolved over the four decades since the Azteca Stadium last hosted the tournament. While much remains to be seen—the Mexican national team has so far exceeded expectations and could well outperform the US—one thing seems clear: Football is no longer an exceptional realm that inverts the hierarchy of Mexico’s subaltern relationship with its northern neighbor.
February 24, 2026
But, after eleven years of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the project of erasing the ordinary is clear and unassailable.
A Pillar On Its Side
February 20, 2026
Import the War, Export the Border
US empire after liberal internationalism
If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overseas empire.
January 16, 2026
Iran's Three-Body Problem
Notes on the current uprising
The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious.
December 3, 2025
Reconciliation versus Real Estate
In Varosha
More than fifty years since its thirty thousand inhabitants—most of them Greek-Cypriots—fled before the advancing Turkish army, the resort city of Varosha on Cyprus’s southeastern coast has been reborn. Now, from 8 AM to 6 PM every day, visitors are free to enter this modern wasteland through a casually guarded gate and wander a small portion of its once-thriving streets. From what I’ve seen, the tourism may be less dark than dumb, kitschifying the skeletal city into yet another selfie backdrop.
May 9, 2025
What a Terrible Name!
On Ismail Kadare
Kadare responded to political criticism with haughty petulance, but as a distraction from more troubling aspects of his work it likely saved his reputation. That’s because the connecting thread of Kadare’s oeuvre is neither an opposition to totalitarianism nor, as his less generous critics have claimed, pro-regime toadyism, but rather a monomaniacal mission to rewrite Albanian history by erasing the legacy of five centuries of Ottoman rule and fabricating cultural continuity with Greek antiquity.
Do Border
Immigration politics and the nativist cycle
This is the state of American immigration politics: a destructive competition over who can do border better. But, as the unholy linking of foreign military aid to domestic border defense attests, this gross spectacle distracts from a far wider web of issues. Who has a right to migrate to the US and make their home here? Who gets to drop US-made bombs, and who is expected to silently suffer them? Because a Democratic President is punishing refugees at the US-Mexico border while also sponsoring the genocide of refugees in Gaza, these are not unrelated questions.
April 8, 2022
Big in India
Hugeness has been one of the more flamboyant features of the Modi government’s tenure
The afterglow of this communion extends into the final, much-anticipated delight: a “cultural boat ride” promising “ten thousand years of Indian Culture in ten minutes.” This air-conditioned funfair ride begins, appropriately enough, on the mythic “banks of the Saraswati” (a now unknown or extinct river celebrated in the Vedas) festooned with tableaux of ten-thousand-year-old “Vedic” agriculture, Vedic universities, Vedic bazaars, Vedic elections and even the “first conference on embryology.” Never mind that the prevailing historical consensus is that the earliest Vedic “texts” (they were originally orally transmitted) are little more than 3,500 years old. Further downriver, things get weirder as we witness the Indic invention of everything from plastic surgery to the airplane.
May 10, 2021
The Ambitions of Illiberal Democracy
How did the revolutionaries of 1989 become the nativists of the 2010s and 2020s?
Migration shapes nativist politics, but does not suffice to explain the wider crisis of liberalism. Exclusionary policies on immigration are being pursued in most European countries (with some notable exceptions, such as Portugal). Yet despite general anti-immigrant sentiment, it is only in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Hungary that nationalist governments have actively turned away from the European Union, and only in Budapest and Warsaw that open season has been declared on liberal civil society and the rule of law. Kaczyński and Orbán are special among Europe’s nationalists not for their chauvinism, but for their authoritarian actions against domestic opponents and the EU.
