M. Francis Wolff reviews Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, in The New Inquiry:

Adam Johnson’s latest novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, is one of those rare works of high ambition that follow through on all of its promises. Set in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it...

Perry Anderson responds to critics of his The New Old World in New Left Review:

Most of the literature on the EU, as noted in [The New Old World's] foreword, is highly technical, enjoying little currency among non-specialists; in addition much of it is so ideologically uniform as to stifle,...

Klaus-Michael Bogdal in Eurozine:

Is Europe anything more than the remnants of a grand political delusion? Is there a cultural bond that unites the nations and peoples of this fragmented continent? From Max Weber to Norbert Elias, the greats of European intellectual history have described and...

Jonathan Littell in the LRB (image from wikimedia commons):

A large banner proclaimed the demonstrators’ allegiance to the Syrian National Council: ‘No! To imaginary opposition, fabrications of Assad’s gangs. The SNC unites us, factions divide us.’ All around, mountains of rubbish...

Michael Bauwens in Al Jazeera:

Does Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the company's estimated value coming from?

This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term "Free Labour" to...

Vijay Prashad in Jadaliyya:

“The overall anti-imperialist sentiment remains strong among the Syrian population and the attempts by parts of the Left to smear the entire uprising as a stand-in for imperialism belies a Manichean worldview that badly misunderstands the country’s history. I...

From lensculture:

The international jury of the 55th annual World Press Photo Contest has selected a picture by Samuel Aranda from Spain as the World Press Photo of the Year 2011. The picture shows a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by...

From New York Magazine:

Of all the gatherings, it’s TED, which might as well be the official event of digitization, that has acquired an outsize cultural footprint. Giving a talk at TED, the technology journalist Steven Levy has written, is �a rite of passage for an Internet-age...