In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán
My heart sank when I first saw the magazine’s thirtieth-anniversary issue on paper. My managing editor back then, Michael Strizic, and I had spent the morning pacing in our small, dark office — anxious to receive several heavy boxes from Ottawa. Eventually I couldn’t stand the anticipation, so I walked ten minutes or so to Harbord Bakery to distract myself. The magazines had arrived by the time I returned.
Thirty-five years ago, in the inaugural issue of this magazine, I reviewed the newly published diary of André Laurendeau, written from 1964 to 1967 during the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The timing was apt: politicians, scholars, and journalists were speculating heavily on how to fix the “Canadian crisis” following the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord the year before.
“By Authority of Parliament: The Constitutional Boundaries of Legislative Power in Canada” by Ryan Alford
In 2017, during the early days of Donald Trump’s first term, the world was riveted both by his reality TV presidency and by the salacious rumours about the way he had obtained it. Insistent tales circulated about how Vladimir Putin’s troll army had engineered the Republican candidate’s victory by hacking into the Democratic Party’s servers and then releasing thousands of embarrassing emails on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. What followed was a stormy season of investigations and counter-accusations about Trump’s Russian proclivities.
My first day ever in New York, age sixteen, I got stuck in the middle of Central Park in the pouring rain with no umbrella and zero sense of direction. Drenched, cold, and hopelessly wandering from the Alice in Wonderland statue to the steps of the Met, I was in remarkably high spirits. I had read Just Kids earlier that summer and regarded this trip as a rite of passage in my Patti Smith pilgrimage. The city was not a stranger to me: there was Washington Square Park, where Patti had slept during her first few weeks, she and Robert Mapplethorpe surviving on lettuce sandwiches. Sure, each face I passed on Fifth Avenue was unfamiliar, but I could imagine Patti and just know I belonged. Even the comically overpriced T-shirts at the John Varvatos store on the Bowery shimmered with Patti and CBGB-era spirit.
Patti wasn’t my first author/guide. I’d opted for books over a social life throughout much of high school and had long approached new destinations through the eyes of a beloved author. When I began at Smith College, I knew from Sylvia Plath’s journals to write in my own on the porch of Haven/Wesley. I assumed this author-as-friend-guide was my own (mal)adaptive quirk. That is, until I read Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.
The Netflix series Bridgerton features a plotline about a nineteenth-century noblewoman desperately seeking a sexual “pinnacle” that coitus withholds from her yet not her husband. Meanwhile, the New York TimesWirecutter product review site recommends vibrators you can buy at Walgreens.
My, times have changed.
Fifty years ago, when feminist writer Shere Hite (1942–2020) published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, one of the best-selling books of all time, conventional wisdom dictated that plain old intercourse was the ticket to orgasm for women as well as men. Any woman who needed clitoral stimulation was deviant or trapped in her “phallic” stage; a mature woman achieved orgasm through the vagina (thanks, Freud). Hetero men didn’t know that what felt good for them didn’t necessarily feel good for women. Many women chose to fake pleasure rather than speak up because they were embarrassed or, rightly, worried about being belittled as pushy and slutty.
I had anticipated that Rachel Cusk’s latest would be a captivating work of big ideas. The premise—a nameless narrator encounters one of the great and celebrated film actors of the era and then attempts to write an “autobiography” of said star—is both juicy and think-y, a stage upon which brilliant observations can mingle with feminine angst and glamour.
In 1959 Elizabeth Hardwick complained that American book reviews were drowning in praise. Sixty-seven years later the complaint still stands, and a new Intellicurean essay asks a harder question: who is left to be wrong?
An empty chair above a flood of praise, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing” is the most famous complaint about soft criticism, and Who Is Left to Be Wrong begins by taking her at her word, numbers and all. From there it moves through Rosalind Krauss’s six-word claim about video, a BuzzFeed pledge borrowed from Thumper, and Edmund Wilson’s six-month public quarrel with Vladimir Nabokov. Then it opens the published guidelines of twelve leading review outlets to see what any of them actually says about judgment.
What we liked most is that the essay holds itself to its own standard. Its claim narrowed when the evidence came back against it, and it abandoned a count it couldn’t make honestly, saying so plainly at the end. Along the way it arrives at a sentence about favours that haven’t happened yet, and we haven’t stopped thinking about it.
The weight of a favour not yet done, made for the essay.
“Sadness of success”, writes Albert Camus in a notebook entry for June 25, 1947: “If everything were more difficult for me, as before, I’d have much more right to say what I say”. The success in question was winning the Prix des Critiques for La Peste (The Plague), published a fortnight earlier. It could be worse, the reader wants to tell him by way of consolation: you could have won the Nobel. Fast-forward ten years and the entry for October 17, 1957, reads: “Nobel. Strange feeling of overwhelming weight and melancholy. At 20 years old, poor and naked, I knew true glory. My mother”.
From its origins in the classical physique and homoerotic spectacle, bodybuilding today often involves the use of steroids whose dangers are not properly understood.
When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Conor Heffernan
A Genealogy of Male Bodybuilding: From Classical to Freaky by Dimitris Liokaftos
Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity by Broderick D.V. Chow
What is the rise of AI capital, and what does it mean for contemporary work, culture, and the ecological state of our planet? John Bellamy Foster dispels the myth of a “hyperorganized AI capitalism.” As Foster writes: “We are not entering a stable new age…but rather a new, capitalist-engendered global disorder in which humanity, according to climate science, is headed ever more rapidly toward a planetary ‘point of no return.'” The only way out—the only way, that is, to ensure the survival of humanity—is a radical shift away from the catastrophically destructive regime of capital accumulation and toward sustainable human development through socialism.
Paul Buhle reviews The Radical Jewish Tradition by Donny Glickstein and Janey Stone. The book, Buhle writes, is a window onto “the antinomies of nineteenth-century Jewish life”—including the growing movement against Zionism and for socialism among Eastern European Jews. This authors, Buhle notes, also tells the story of Jewish communists in Britain, the United States, and beyond, taking into account the wide sweep of Jewish left activity globally, situating the present struggles against genocide in Palestine squarely within the legacy of radical Jews everywhere.
Today’s resurgence in U.S. imperialist interventions abroad and the concomitant so-called crisis of the “rules-based order” can be explained, Luís Eduardo Fernandes argues, through the category of “legal imperialism, which refers to how the international juridical form is internalized within societies and in the context of dependency, colonialism, unequal exchange, and monopoly capital. “International law and imperialism,” Fernandes writes, “do not stand as opposing poles. They are part of the same unity.… Violence is constitutive of the juridical form.”
King’s Secretary: William Paget and the Last Years of the Reign of Henry VIII By Andrew Johnston
Tudor history buffs and attentive readers of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy will recognise the name William Paget. Others will require some words of introduction. Paget (1505/6–63) was an able and influential diplomat and administrator who rose to become principal secretary to Henry VIII. ‘Rose’ is the operative word. Paget, like his predecessor and mentor Thomas Cromwell, was a self-made man, though his father, a sergeant serving the sheriff of London, was able to provide him with a grammar school and Cambridge education.
The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada By Arthur der Weduwen
Much is exceptional about the Bayeux Tapestry currently on magnificent display in the British Museum, but nothing is quite so exceptional as the event itself. As the museum’s website reminds us, 1066 ‘was the last time England was successfully invaded’. Our sea-girt immunity from foreign invasion has been at the centre of ‘Our Island Story’ ever since, with the Channel confounding the hubris of Philip II in 1588 and 1596, of Napoleon in 1803 and of Hitler in 1940.
Imperial Predator: Britain and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire By David S Tonge
In his survey of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, David S Tonge sees Britain as an aggressive superpower, hence the title of his excellent book. My one quibble is zoological. ‘Predator’ may not be quite the right word. For in much of Tonge’s story Britain is less lion than vulture: what zoologists call an obligate scavenger – or a necrophagous power – feeding on carrion. The Ottoman carcass had already been wounded by Russian aggression, nationalist revolt, indebtedness and internal decay. There were exceptions, and Britain could be predatory when circumstances demanded, notably in Cyprus and Alexandria, but its more characteristic pose was to sniff the odour of mortality and arrive in time for lunch.
Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of sincere praise: the book held my attention all the way to the end, I learned things from it, and I read it twice. These are not reactions I expect most new books to generate, let alone one written by someone not yet of legal drinking age. Hence on this basis alone, I would have to concede that Rule (borrowing Baker’s shorthand for a “secret” Stanford class, about which more below) is a real achievement.
The first marriage in Tuscan history was not between a man and a woman but between a vine and a tree. Before the Etruscans cleared these hills, they were dense with oakwood, through which wild grape vines climbed naturally toward the canopy, wedded to the forest in which they grew. The Etruscans formalized that marriage. Vines were trained up living maples, elms, and poplars. Grapes were cut from ladders or with long sickles. Later Italians called it the vite maritata—the married vine.
After watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in a sold-out IMAX theater, my husband and I were heading for the exit when we were attacked by smiling employees brandishing free rolled-up posters. Raising our shields, we broke through their phalanx, leaped aboard our vessel moored in the parking lot, and sailed homeward with only a few posters glancing off the moonroof.
Willem de Kooning’s works on paper document his efforts to find ways of retaining both image and abstraction, depth and flatness.
Willem de Kooning Drawing an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, June 14–September 20, 2026, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, October 9, 2026–January 17, 2027
Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume IV: Elia and The Last Essays of Elia edited by Gregory Dart
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