This book is effectively a sequel to Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, which inspired an hilarious film of the same name. That book exposed the US military's serious experimentation with all sorts of weird and whacky, New Age, mind-altering techniques to produce better killers.
Denis Diderot is now remembered, if at all, only as the name of a Metro railway station in an unfashionable neighbourhood of Paris.
In his day, however, the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher was quite the subversive intellectual who parted the ideological fog of religious, moral and political backwardness for a view of the sunnier uplands of today’s society, writes Phil Shannon.
Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus takes a look at five new books that belong on an ecosocialist bookshelf.
Dr Richard Sorge, a German communist who penetrated the innermost political and military circles of the Japanese and German governments for a decade from the mid-1930s, only ever had one good thing to say about the Nazis.
While it was Afro-American blues music that grew into rock and roll, soul music sprang from the Black tradition of gospel churches. Aretha Franklin was undoubtedly the greatest soul singer of the 60s and this film shows that she never left the church behind.
There would have been no Enlightenment without Avicenna and his successor, Averroes – who Bloch sees as forming an “Aristotelian left” trend, writes Barry Healy.
Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus looks at new books for green lefts on how the richest drive climate change; planning from below; the Scottish clearances; slime; and eco-socialism and practical utopias.
In Risking Together, Dick Bryan and Mike Rafferty look at how the financialisation of the global economy has swept up the lives of ordinary people who had nothing to do with playing the financial markets. In the process, their lives have come to mirror the risks of stock exchange, derivative and currency market speculation.
The English word “loot” is derived from the Hindi word lut, which means to steal, especially by plunder in time of war.
