This piece argues that AI makes a transition beyond capitalism unavoidable and that the live political choice is between democratic and authoritarian socialism. Capitalism, in this account, no longer delivers affordable goods, stable work, or the public goods of liberty and equality. AI will deepen job loss and detach income from labor, so the author proposes a publicly governed AI, a large UBI, and regulated markets guided by democratic planning rather than investor profit.

While marketing itself as "fully automated," Waymo's robotaxi service depends on low-level human labor: workers clean sensors and interiors, move stalled cars, offload trip data, install software, and follow reset scripts. This interview describes chaotic contracting through Transdev, high turnover, shifting assignments, and depot congestion that cars often cannot resolve. It also notes remote intervention limits and routine cleanup of vomit, feces, and other messes left by riders.

This essay argues for recentering peripherality in modernist studies against planetary or network models that soften structural inequality. Peripheral modernism, the author contends, becomes legible through capitalism's uneven development, which shapes formal ambivalence, imitation, and claims to autonomy. Introducing a cluster on Latin America, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and the US interior, the author treats peripheral form as a way to register political and aesthetic contradictions.

Since the 1990s, El Salvador has moved from "radical" and "mitigated" neoliberalism to a more authoritarian "primitive neoliberalism." The author shows how liberalization, dollarization, privatization, and anti-union policy have weakened productive capacity and tied growth to services, imports, migration, and remittances. Under the current government, coercive rule, deregulation, regressive fiscal policy, and debt expansion deepen inequality while finance gains over labor.

In reflecting on a Chicago arena concert by Rosalía, this essay describes the near-hysterical devotion of the crowd and the singer's command of voice, image, and sexualized stagecraft. The piece weighs flamenco against pop spectacle, mystic language against commercial procedure, and live presence against giant-screen mediation. It argues that the performance offers not communal feeling but private adoration, with each spectator absorbed in a singular fantasy of intimacy.

This interview examines the South African photobook as a medium that shapes, rather than merely contains, photographic meaning. The interviewee traces how books move beyond iconic images and news photography to sequence archives, memory, propaganda, protest, and private experience across apartheid and its aftermath. He argues that the form's durability, portability, and capacity for slow accumulation make it a site of political and aesthetic struggle, from Ernest Cole and David Goldblatt to Zanele Muholi and Lindokuhle Sobekwa.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, a data center boom turned abandoned dot-com infrastructure into a large commercial tax base that funds schools and lowers property taxes. This piece argues that the same model now exposes the costs other US communities may face as AI drives expansion: constant noise, transmission lines near homes and schools, pressure on land and utilities, and fights over zoning. Loudoun becomes a preview of the tradeoffs in the national buildout.

In defining finance as credit, value advanced for future increase, this essay argues that critiques of financialization depend on how finance is conceived: as a parasite detachable from the "real" economy, an organ integral to production, a site of struggle between credit and production, or a matter of political decision. Each framing opens different forms of resistance, from debt abolition and regulation to democratic or global control, while exposing limits in treating finance as either removable or inevitable.

The EU’s push to triple data center capacity for AI is tying Europe more tightly to US tech firms while worsening water stress, energy demand, and fossil fuel dependence. This piece points to underused existing capacity, local resistance in Spain and the US, and a growing alliance between tech and oil companies that promotes gas-fired power and carbon capture as "green" solutions. It also describes lobbying efforts to weaken transparency over data center energy use.

Canada’s beef industry is distorting climate research by mentoring early-career scientists, funding projects, and defining "sustainability" as continued industry growth. The result is work that stresses emissions per kilogram, feed additives, and manure management while excluding the question of herd size. This article contends that technically accurate findings are then used in public messaging and education to suggest environmental progress even as total beef-sector emissions rise.