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The Elusive Karl Polanyi  

Since the Great Recession, Karl Polanyi has become a totem for social democracy. But as a new biography of him suggests, Polanyi himself is an uneasy fit as spokesman for any specific social order.



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A Strange and Far-flung War  

Technological innovation has been key to American military policy since 9/11, but it has by no means been the only driver of change. We might better view these years as a story of the U.S. national security apparatus gradually breaking free of the restraints imposed on it in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. It is also a story of the military and intelligence wings of this apparatus becoming increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable from one another.



Indebted  

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber Melville House, 2011, 554 pp. As recently as a year ago, the anthropologist David Graeber was well respected within his academic discipline but little-known outside of it. His sole brush with public …