Trump’s second term has begun with a whirlwind of iconoclastic pronouncements and an opening to Moscow that has sent European rulers into ideological crisis. An American-policy aide-mémoire offers baseline metrics for the ruptures—and continuities—ahead.

Cryptocurrency offered to the global underprivileged in exchange for biometric data; a fragmentary ‘common sense’ on Gramscian lines produced by training generative AI. Hito Steyerl reflects on the hegemonic relations of new tech models.

America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?

The oeuvre of Kehinde Wiley—art-world representative of the American super-rich—as iconography of capitalist desire in crisis. Can paintings transfixed by the glamour of the ruling class offer a coded indictment of it, via the assimilation of Romantic and Renaissance prototypes?

Portrait of the organizer of the 1963 issue of Il Contemporaneo on Britain, by way of his memoir, I distintivi all’occhiello. From the Resistance to the PCI to journalistic postings in Italy and beyond, a work marrying sentimental history and political retrospect, revealing a radical and independent-minded figure.

How far did Britain’s class structure alter in the sixties, with the onset of the ‘affluent society’? As counterpoint to prevalent myths and pieties, Hobsbawm supplies a mordant panorama of shifting habits and customs against a backdrop of polarized class and cultural divergence.