Iberian Punk Sampler
Times are tough in Spain. Suffering the aftereffects of the collapse of a speculative real-estate bubble in 2008, debarred from improving its export position through devaluation because of its...
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Outlawing German Fascism
2012 was a year of rude awakenings in Germany. The revelations surrounding the National Socialist Underground terror cell, which had been allowed to murder at least ten people (nine of which were...
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The Charge of Anti-Semitism
When the Simon Wiesenthal Center published its 2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs list, it comprised many obvious figures. #1 was Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has routinely called for...
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Orwell in Mali
It was supposed to be over. The conflict in Mali, which was said to be on the verge of resolution, has devolved into an old fashioned guerrilla war. With French and Malian forces battling Ansar al-Dine...
View ArticleSend in the Clowns
Modern politics is so often the preserve of spin, of carefully shaped, focus group-tested utterances, that it can be shocking when someone says what they mean. So it was, when Peer Steinbrück, a...
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Kenya For Beginners
Kenya’s elections went better than expected. True, accusations of vote rigging have led the losers to contest the result. More alarming, however, both the newly-elected president and his running mate...
View ArticleIn Crust We Trust
One of the peculiarities of the early punk scene was the way that certain sounds became associated with certain towns. In mid-1980s, New York became famous for bands with a crunchy, metallic sound,...
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The Fred Perry Murder
The fight, in which Clément Meric died, apparently started over some shirts. An 18-year-old student at Paris’ prestigious Sciences Po, Meric was headed to a clothing shop in the 9th Arrondissement when...
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Styles of Freedom
One of the peculiarities of punk is that its ethos of personal freedom has often been expressed through regimentation. Punk’s earliest exponents had no coherent ideology, yet punk exists today as a...
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Dead Cities
Given the eminent place of Detroit in the history of the United States, the announcement that it had filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection last week did not make the splash that some expected. With...
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Brutal Truths
Edited by Titus Hjelm, Keith Kahn-Harris, Mark LeVine, Heavy Metal Controversies and Countercultures presents a wide range of perspectives and approaches to the topic, probing the ways that race,...
View ArticleHarmony Corruption
There’s no more overused an adjective than legendary. ’Legend’ used to be reserved those men and achievements that surpassed the norms of everyday experience. Now it is called into service to validate...
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Cold War Minds
The Cold War was an asymmetric struggle. While communism did not form the monolithic bloc that its liberal democratic critics claimed, the breadth of overt political contestation was kept to a minimum....
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The Problem of Global Somalia
Somalia’s PR strategy is violence. Or so one might be inclined to think, based on press coverage of Nairobi’s spectacular Westfield mall attack by al-Shabaab gunmen (and apparently women.) The last...
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The Problem With Austerity
When the House and Senate budget talks got underway a few weeks ago, Paul Ryan, the GOP’s lead running dog on economic policy, reiterated the party line: The current situation is unsustainable....
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In Praise of Failure
Tony Judt, who died in 2010 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had the quality of an epigone. This is not the case because he was a historian of a stripe very much in retreat from the onslaught of...
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Open City
In the fall of 1992, I moved to New York to attend the New School for Social Research. Separated from my social scene in Portland, Oregon and with little money, I spent my first weeks in Manhattan...
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Inside Merkel’s Greece
Greece has taken on the characteristics of a matinee horror show. Like other states on Europe’s periphery, the postwar success story been transformed into a mad laboratory, where technocrats experiment...
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Making Sense of Marx
Biographical writing can seem futile. This is true in a trivial sense, because on the surface, history is always shaped by the present. One of the best measures of a historian is their ability to...
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The Not-So-Great War
In May 1903, a group of Serbian army officers fired their way into the royal palace in Belgrade. King Alexander, the scion of the Obrenović dynasty, was discovered with his wife Draga, hiding in a...
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