Version 1: Fri, Jun 5, 2026
New books in my future reading list, and possibly yours too:
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore - Source: penguin.co.uk
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/483176/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-artificial-state-by-lepore-jill/9780241836552 by Jill Lepore - Allen Lane - Aug 2026.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker https://jlepore.scholars.harvard.edu/
Interview with Jill Lepore “The rise of the Artificial State has been predicted in science for centuries. So has its fall.” https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/featured-stories/people/2026/20250212-hegel-lecture-with-jill-lepore/index.html - Archive https://archive.ph/uaMKO - On February 12, historian Jill Lepore came to Freie Universität Berlin to deliver the 2026 Hegel Lecture on the increasing control of politics by machines. The Dahlem Humanities Center is responsible for organizing the Hegel Lecture series.
Professor Lepore, can you describe, briefly, what you are going to talk about in the lecture?
The lecture argues that the liberal nation-state is being fast replaced with what I call the “Artificial State,” a digital communications infrastructure with which governments and private corporations organize and automate politics and public discourse. I’m trying to give a name to what is happening.
The Artificial State: As American civic life has become increasingly shaped by algorithms, trust in government has plummeted. Is there any turning back? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-artificial-state By Jill Lepore - The New Yorker - Nov 4, 2024
Genocide in Gaza
Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine https://irishpages.org/product/genocide-in-gaza/?v=d692bc40d834 by Avi Shlaim - Irish Pages - 2024.
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2024.
Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Antony’s College.
Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine by Avi Shlaim https://braveneweurope.com/genocide-in-gaza-israels-long-war-on-palestine-by-avi-shlaim Book Review by Hossam el-Hamalawy - Brave New Europe - Jan 15, 2026 - Archive https://archive.is/9vqbN
The West
The West: The History of an Idea https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177182/the-west by Georgios Varouxakis - Princeton University Press - 2025.
Georgios Varouxakis, Professor of the History of Political Thought - Queen Mary University of London https://www.qmul.ac.uk/history/people//academic-staff/profiles/varouxakisgeorgios.html
Satyajit Das: Book Essay: In Western Eyes – A History of the idea of the West https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/05/satyajit-das-book-essay-in-western-eyes-a-history-of-the-idea-of-the-west.html Book review - May 28, 2026 - Archive https://archive.is/8MmKd
‘West’, for most, is a directional vector. It is not, as often assumed, fixed. In a spherical planet, east and west or north and south depend on your reference point. In The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2025), Georgios Varouxakis, a Professor of the history of political thought, encounters the same problem in tracing the social or political concept known as the ‘West’.
Erudite, well-researched and accessible, the book traces the history of the term. Professor Varouxakis argues it emerged in the 1820s, primarily to distinguish Europe from Russia. The central figure was French philosopher Auguste Comte, rarely read any more, who used the terminology. Wanting to abolish empire and conquest, he and the positivists sought to create a republic led by the five great Western nations: the French, Italian, Spanish, British, and German. He found ‘Europe’ to be confusing because of Russia, which was to have no part of this new arrangement. But through its tortured history, the term has co-existed or been used interchangeably with: European, occidental or even Christendom.
Professor Varouxakis traces the changes in the concept chronologically. He covers the 19th century debates about Europe versus the West and the emergence of Britain and Germany as influences. He traces the impact of the Great War, the inter-war interregnum, World War 2, the Cold War and its aftermath. Central to the term’s significance is debates over the status of Russia, Germany and America, and the vexed difference between Europe and the West.
This is the start of the review, but he continues later on:
Despite its considerable achievements, there are several issues with the book. …
Other takes on the book:
Culture clash: A civilization defined by Russophobia https://www.the-tls.com/history/the-west-georgios-varouxakis-book-review-hans-kundnani By Hans Kundnani - Times Lit Supplement - Archive https://archive.ph/UE93H
Books Jacobin Loved in 2025 https://jacobin.com/2025/12/2025-book-recommendations-heideman-hao
By
Heffloaf
- Own work,
CC
BY-SA 4.0,
Link
The EU Propaganda Machine
The EU propaganda machine: New book of mine out about the EU-NGO-media-academia propaganda complex https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/the-eu-propaganda-machine by Thomas Fazi
This is the English translation of the introduction. The book is in Italian but I expect it will published in English soon.
‘The EU has become Neo Totalitarian’ with Thomas Fazi https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/05/the-eu-has-become-neo-totalitarian-with-thomas-fazi/ In this conversation, journalist and author Thomas Fazi joins Carl Deconinck to discuss the arguments behind his new book, The EU Propaganda Machine: The Dark Side of NGOs, Media and Universities. - 12 May 2026
The Papal Curse
The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome https://arktos.com/product/the-papal-curse/ by Laurent Guyénot - Arktos Media - 2026.
The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome https://grokipedia.com/page/The_Papal_Curse_The_Medieval_Origin_of_the_European_Syndrome
The Papal Curse: The Medieval Origin of the European Syndrome, published in 2026, is a 240-page book by French author Laurent Guyénot that offers a revisionist historical and metapolitical analysis of Europe’s persistent challenges.[11] Guyénot argues that the continent’s chronic political division, restlessness, internal wars, and modern crises—collectively termed the “European Syndrome”—originate in the transformative and destructive interventions of the medieval papacy.
The book’s central thesis contends that papal actions, including the Crusades, conflicts with emperors and secular rulers, and the fostering of Western individualism and globalist ambitions, actively prevented the emergence of a unified European Empire.[1] By intertwining religious authority with political power, the papacy fragmented Europe’s natural imperial trajectory, leading to enduring disunity and recurring self-destructive tendencies.
Guyénot develops this argument through an interdisciplinary lens, integrating history, theology, and geopolitics to trace the long-term consequences of these medieval developments on Europe’s political and cultural evolution
About the author:
Laurent Guyénot is a French author and historian specializing in medieval studies, the anthropology of religion, and revisionist interpretations of historical and religious narratives. Born in France in 1960, he initially trained as an engineer, graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA) in Paris in 1982.
After working briefly in the armaments industry in the United States, Guyénot shifted his focus to the history and anthropology of religions, earning a doctorate in Medieval Studies from Paris IV-Sorbonne in 2008.
Orthodox Pravda: Christ Is Risen https://www.unz.com/article/orthodox-pravda-christ-is-risen/ by Brother Nilus - Apr 23, 2026
Orthodox Christian monk Brother Nilus on the book.
Economics in America
Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691247625/economics-in-america by Angus Deaton - Priceton Uiversity Press - 2023
Walden Bello – The Existential Crisis of Mainstream Economics https://braveneweurope.com/walden-bello-the-existential-crisis-of-mainstream-economics book review - Naked Capitalism - Mar 30, 2026 - Archive https://archive.ph/IaAwx
There is probably no one better qualified to discuss the crisis of mainstream economics than Deaton, one of the leading experts on the economics of health and inequality, a former president of American Economic Association, and a Nobel Prize winner. He is about as mainstream as one can get, though of the center-left variety, probably owing to his training at Cambridge, which apparently not only produced spies for the Soviet Union but also economic iconoclasts like John Maynard Keynes.
Deaton does not beat around the bush. The profession brought the calamity on itself because a great many of its members have been bought by powerful interests to produce the research and policy proposals that would benefit them. Though Deaton would be more measured and courteous in the way he would put it, that is essentially the theme that runs through this book. There may be some who really believe that the untrammeled market is the best way to allocate resources, but for most that belief is sweetened by the financial support, in the form of grants and consultancies, of powerful special interests.
Take the case of the minimum wage. Rigorous experiments by a number of well-regarded researchers have produced results that by now should have yielded no opposition to the fact that raising the minimum wage does not create unemployment. But half the profession still believes it does, and there’s no shaking them from this belief, whose main bankroller is the fast-food industry that sees the false doctrine as useful to keep the wages of its hamburger flippers low.
Health care has probably been the key battlefield over social policy over the last two decades in the United States, and no one knows more about the health industry than Deaton, whose Nobel Prize was earned largely by his studies of the relationship among health, poverty, and inequality. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was, overall, positive in that it brought insurance coverage to around 20 million formerly uninsured people. But it was a Pyrrhic victory since the best solution to escalating medical costs, the single-payer or public option, was not even allowed to be discussed, and insurance companies were allowed to continue to hawk deceptive policies to an unwary public.
Research and the experience of European countries demonstrate clearly that a single payer national health system would radically reduce costs and would also keep inequality down because all share the risks of ill health and “prevent unequal burdens of sickness to turn into inequalities of earnings.” So, what keeps this seemingly rational solution from being adopted? An unholy alliance among the insurance companies, the medical establishment, Big Pharma, politicians in the pocket of business, and, of course, the legions of economists employed directly by them or paid as academic consultants.
Started: Fri, Jun 5, 2026
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