The Drift
“A Radical Demonstration of ‘America First’” | An Interview with Adam Tooze
The Drift
A year into a crisis of world-historic proportions, and what have we learned? After flubbing every aspect of the pandemic response, from masks to contact tracing, the U.S. has been rewarded with a return to what seems a lot like normal life. The market — following a series of erratic plot twists and what looked like it should have been another Great Depression — seems to have bounced back stronger...
“A Punishing American Zeitgeist” | An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
The Drift
With Trump finally, dramatically out of office, the efforts to historicize his tenure have already begun. What is his legacy? How did we get here? What’s next? Long an astute commentator on race, imperialism, and the history of American political struggle, Nikhil Pal Singh has been an essential scholarly voice amidst the chaos that defined the Trump era, and the online noise that continues even in his absence. Singh is...
“Naming the Work” | An Interview with Silvia Federici
The Drift
Last month, the U.S. saw hundreds of thousands of women disappear from the workforce, part of a trend that has accelerated since the pandemic began. At the same time, we’re seeing a transformation of attitudes toward work and the organization of society around it, as the rupture of normalcy reveals deep-seated unsustainability. To guide us in thinking through this tumultuous time, we Zoomed with the legendary Marxist feminist scholar-activist Silvia...
“A Worldwide Mutual Pact” | An Interview with Wendy Brown
The Drift
There are limits to the utility of theory in a crisis. So far, Covid-19 has not exactly occasioned a mass embrace of the mountains of leftist ideas—both theoretical and practical—that have been prepared for such a moment; instead, we’ve witnessed a hardening of the preexisting order, in which the old injustices have only become more grotesque. Meanwhile, the intellectual class has tweeted, blogged, and otherwise emerged from the proverbial woodwork...
