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Has there ever been a more magnificently paranoid vision of intellectual activity than that offered by the Italian leftist thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini in one of his final texts, “Is this a Military Coup D’Etat? I Know…”?

In these troubling times, we should return to Stuart Hall, a remarkable political thinker and cultural analyst.

We live in ahyper-factualage, where we know more, with greater speed, about more things than ever before in history.

“We’ve had enough!” — “There’s no more room!” — “They’reto blame for the housing shortage!” — “They’ve taken all our jobs.” — “Our country isfull.”

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports ofpolio virusfound in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO).Mountains of garbageare piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports thatclearing 40 million tons of rubblemay take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040...

Photo:CNN Presidential Debate, 27 June 2024 (WSJ.com/CNN)

Slavoj Žižek.Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 320 s.

It is increasingly recognized that large language models (LLMs) are prone to erroneous outputs, a phenomenon known ashallucinations. As AI spreads ever wider into the technological substrate of late modernity—summarizing news stories, synthesizing search results, condensing research papers,...

Social democracy may be the solution to the problems of some fortunate subset of individual nations, but it is not a solution for the world as such—that is, tocollective global problemsand to theproblems of poorer nations around the globetoday. Instead, social democracy—so Iargue in a forthcoming...

I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consultthe draft here)[1], which is...