This essay, on the realities of the white working class, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 April 2025, under the headline “The white working class is nothing like what politicians think – or claim – it is”. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants”, Labour MP David Winnick told the House of Commons in 1968, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the debate over decolonising Shakespeare, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 March 2025, under the headline “Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice?” “My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression...| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the significance of the Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 March 2025, under the headline “Ignore the row: Oscar-winning No Other Land offers a vision of a shared Palestine forged in solidarity”. In 2009, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. He had come to see a school that had gained attention for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the lessons of Milton for the politics of today, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 March 2025, under the headline “For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton’s radical vision is poetry in motion”. “Is this pessimism?”, TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. “Well, yes.” How else, he wonders, “are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance… and the almost complete […]| Pandaemonium
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, revolutionised urban theory. This essay kicks off a series exploring Jacobs’ influential ideas and their potential to address today’s urban challenges and enhance city living. Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey, the author of this collection of essays, studies philosophy and economics on the …| Market Urbanism
Oresteia at the Park Avenue Armory, New York. Photo: Joan Marcus This essay, on what Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy can tell us about the Gaza conflict, was my Observer column this week. It was …| Pandaemonium
