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Yanis Varoufakis (2023), Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage.

Eva Dou (2025), House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company. Portfolio.

Yanis Varoufakis’s much-touted Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is essentially built atop hyperbole: Varoufakis subscribes to the peculiar thesis that “capitalism is now dead.” By this he means that “its dynamics no longer govern our economies”—and while that takes some unpacking, in essence Varoufakis appears to believe that capitalism has now been “replaced by something fundamentally different”: the titular technofeudalism.

One frequently invoked explanation among progressives for the resurgence of far-right politics in recent times is inflation: Prices rise, food and energy costs go up, mortgages become more expensive, wages don’t keep up, and, so the story goes, as a consequence, working- and middle-class voters begin casting about for a scapegoat to blame for their economic woes. In short, economic pain pushes ordinary people into the arms of the radical right.

Trump’s chosen ideology is what we might termfluid fascism, a remarkably flexible and adaptive ideological approach that cuts across the political spectrum and familiar divides, allowing the two-term president to engage inpolicy liquefaction: oozing from right to left and back again, fluid fascism...

We’re in the fourth week of the second Trump administration, and as many commentators have noted there is simply so much going on in U.S. politics—and therefore global politics: What happens on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in large measure shapes the world.

Is fascism today essentially internationalist—or is it made up of a series of discrete, nationally bounded projects?

Looking around the world today, it’s hard to escape the sense that fascism has become an internationalist project and one that transcends familiar geopolitical blocs and transnational coalitions: The new Fascist International cuts across NATO and BRICS, the West and the Global South, drawing in actors from all major geopolitical camps to form a multinational coalition of far-right, hardline nationalist, fascist-adjacent and outright fascist political actors.

There’s an old adage attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Trump’s first week back in the White House saw him assert his newly reclaimed authority: The 47th president fired off dozens of executive orders, appeared before a variously starstruck, cowering Davos audience, confidently mapped out his administration’s focus on Fox News’s Hannity, and, after threatening a full-blown trade war, reportedly forced Colombia, the U.S.’s premier ally in South America, to accept planeloads of deported migrants.

“BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another…”

— Arthur Miller, A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the strangest episodes in the still-unfolding Trump saga is the 42nd/44th president’s growing interest in Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark, which Trump has said he wants to incorporate into the United States.

Trump has had his sights on Greenland since at least 2019. He first floated the idea of “buying” the autonomous Danish territory five years ago, which the president, in typical property-developer fashion, described as “essentially a real estate deal”:

Céleste Albaret (2003). Monsieur Proust. New York Review of Books. (Foreword by André Aciman, translated from the French by Barbara Bray.)

Monsieur Proust is a remarkable socio-historical and literary document, offering a remarkably unvarnished account of a great literary personality’s everyday life. Anyone who cares about Marcel Proust’s writings should read Céleste Albaret’s gripping account of her years as his housekeeper. The book captures Proust’s peculiar, if not outright bizarre, life in Paris around the time of the Great War—which was also, of course, a time of frenzied creative activity, resulting in his monumental work, À la recherche du temps perdu.

Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski (2019). The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso Books.

What makes this cleverly titled book worth returning to five years after its publication? The authors, Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski, develop a deceptively simple argument: Pay closer attention to what major corporations like Walmart do, and less to what free-market ideologues say, and you’ll find that most capitalist enterprises operate more like carefully planned command economies than idealized market actors. Centralized planning, far from being relegated to the scrapheap of twentieth-century history, is alive and well at the heart of American capitalism: It lies at the core of what companies like Amazon and Walmart do every day.

Reagan (2024). Directed by: Sean McNamara. Starring: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight. (IMDb)

I must confess that Ronald Reagan’s appeal has always mystified me somewhat. Reagan (2024) the movie goes some way toward filling in the blanks, and anyone interested in thinking critically about U.S. politics would benefit from watching it. Despite being widely panned by critics—it currently holds a putrescent eighteen-percent score on Rotten Tomatoes—the film helps account for the long-standing appeal of conservatism in American society. Perhaps in spite of itself, it also demonstrates just how far conservatism has fallen, to such a degree that Trump’s MAGA movement now bears little resemblance to its ideological forbears.