New Left Review

1 week ago | newleftreview.org | Tom Hazeldine

With the death of Hugh Roberts, the world has lost a foremost scholar of contemporary Arab politics and history. His last book, Loved Egyptian Night (2024), a retrospect on the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria, displayed the adamantine clarity that characterised all his work: ‘If politics – in the sense of the practice of politics – is, as Bismarck declared, an art, not a science, the study of politics must be a branch of criticism’, he begins.

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Lola Seaton

A Reply to Malcolm Bull Why is there the amount of art that there is?’—the title of Malcolm Bull’s stimulating article—is an original, odd, question-provoking question.footnote1 Not least: how much art is there? We can perhaps imagine a time when one could have totted up all the finished paintings and sculptures coming out of artists’ workshops. In our era, however, matters are more ontologically complex.

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Ross Douthat

Interviewed by Nick Burns Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a rueful love letter to it. Since those days, you’ve always unmistakeably been an adversary of American liberalism, yet in some ways continue to be a beneficiary of it. Where would you locate yourself—politically, then intellectually—on the map of the contemporary American sc ene?

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Joshua Craze

The 15 April marked the two-year anniversary of a civil war in Sudan that has left tens of thousands dead and millions displaced. I published an essay in Sidecar, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum’, two days after the war began, which tried to trace its emergent lineaments. The conflict initially pitted the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary organization formed during the reign of dictator Omar al Bashir (1989-2019).

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Corey Robin

Tariff, Donald Trump has said, ‘is the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He won’t be pleased to learn that it comes from Arabic. Ta‘rīf is a notification; ‘arrafa means to make known. Despite his many notifications, Trump hasn’t really made known why he’s imposing the tariffs – or why, as of Wednesday, he has put a pause on them. Trumpologists believe they know. Trump hates the rules-based international order. He loves the masculinity of manufacturing.