The IULP is a network that confronts the challenges of the market-driven desiccation of ideas with left books that amplify the voices of ordinary people. MORE ABOUT US Formed in 2020, the International Union of Left Publishers emerged as a platform of left publishers to promote left books through Red Books Day (21 February), to…

BY MARIA POPOVA “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we…

 BY MARIA POPOVA “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.” To fully feel life course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator.” More than half a century before Oliver, another enchantress of the human spirit — the French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3,…

I.  Critical Theories of the Early SocialistsIn the wake of the French Revolution, numerous theories began to circulate in Europe that sought both to respond to demands for social justice unanswered by the French Revolution and to correct the dramatic economic imbalances brought about by the spread of the industrial revolution.The democratic gains following the…

A. S. Hamrah’s review of Michael Mann’s Ferrari   In A. S. Hamrah’s review of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, published this morning on the NYR Online, he describes the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 paean to machines:  He demanded glorious deaths in car crashes, and lauded war and destruction. “Time and space died yesterday!” Marinetti screamed. “We declare that…