The Ideas Letter

Robert Malley is one of the finest US diplomats of recent decades. His new book Tomorrow Is Yesterday, cowritten with Hussein Agha, is a sober, plaintive and deeply analytical dissection of all that has gone wrong with the vaunted two-state “solution.” I was honored to be in conversation with him on a range of themes from Israel-Palestine to Iran to, naturally, US complicity. 

Chetan Bhatt, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, and an expert on social theory as well as far-right violence, examines the failures and missteps of the left’s morality plays in recent years. Rather than confect another screed indicting the left’s descent into identity politics, Bhatt focuses productively on its need to reintegrate morality and knowledge, both to reinspire its moral imagination and to tie it to actual evidence-based reasoning. 

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce has long been one of the keenest observers of the (pan) African scene. Here he wonders to what extent colonial contradictions have ever really been swept away, examining the general flaccidity of institutions like the African Union in the context of Western powers that continue to leech on the continent. 

Our curated content commences with the journal American Affairs, which has quickly become one of the most interesting publications on domestic and foreign matters in the US. Don’t be fooled by its bargain-basement understatement: some of the most critical writing about America’s political and economic condition is found here. This essay, by two young scholars questioning the authoritarian perspective as it applies to the US, is an excellent example. 

Next up is Nedal Abusaif in Critical Legal Thinking who tells a necessary story about post-Apartheid South Africa and,