The Ideas Letter

The porteño Juan Elman is one of Latin America’s sharpest journalists, and we have had the pleasure to feature him twice in our pages. Here Elman takes a synoptic, historical view to address the complex state of play of the left across the region over the last two decades.

Owen Hatherley has been writing imaginatively for some time on the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and political culture in different socialist and post-socialist hot spots. He considers a curious trend of foreign vlogging about China, and what the subculture’s obsessive and weird components mean about the West.

Further on China, Kaiser Kuo’s essay from several issues back has inspired a flood of commentary, but few takes are as compelling as Afra Wang’s. Wang, who grew up in the PRC, unearths new generational perspectives, which add additional layers to the contemporary Chinese condition.

Our curated content for Issue 53 begins with a review of a book by my colleague Balazs Trencsényi, a historian at Central European University, whose stunning new offering at Oxford UP unpacks, theorizes, and historicizes the idea of crisis in Europe. The essay, by Aurelian Craiutu in the Los Angeles Review of Books, gets to the heart of things.

Another fine colleague we have the privilege of featuring is the Nigerian writer Ayisha Osori, who interviews Minna Salami on her recent work reconsidering the feminist dimension in Africa.

The Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell revisits the political theory of Ernest Gellner to regain a grip on the messy concept of civil society and its relevance to the American right today.

Finally, Ville Lähde, in the peerless digital publication Aeon,