The Ideas Letter

Evgeny Morozov reads a lot more than you and I do. He has spent the last few years sequestered in an untouristed patch of the European continent hoovering up theory, penning a magnum opus (in which technology meets capitalism meets ideology), and learning a dozen languages. Soon enough (in summer ‘26, I believe) FSG will unleash the book on the world. Should that prospect excite, and I anticipate it will, note that Morozov’s spiky essay for The Ideas Letter this week defines a new class, the “oligarch-intellectual”—and is an early warning sign of things to come. 

I asked David Runciman, our other commissioned author, to make intellectual sense of his professional pivot. After a quarter century as a Cambridge don, Runciman tossed away his chair in politics and joined the more modish world of fulltime podcasting. Runciman explains what his transition says about the novel forms by which information is transmitted and received.  

Our curated content begins with a stunning essay from the law professor Julie E. Cohen, which follows, in a way, from Morozov’s commissioned contribution. Cohen takes aim at the class of tech oligarchs and traces the origins of their power. You’ll notice her play, of course, on the classic Robert Nozick text. We follow with a fascinating story of Keynesian thinking à la polonaise: Małgorzata Mazurek, a historian at Columbia, discusses, in a taped lecture, two progressive interwar Polish economists and their unlikely intellectual journey.  

Next up is an Aeon profile of the South Korean Heideggerian thinker Byung-Chul Han. In his critique of digital capitalism, the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen provides a broad assessment of both Han’s philosophical contributions and his limitations.  

Last is a podcast that spotlights what’s next for the Kurds of Syria after Assad’s demise,