Sarah Burnside

In Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?  Swedish writer Katrine Marçal casts a suspicious eye on the “story about the meaning of human existence” told by free-market economists and on that story’s hero, the self-interested rational actor: Economic ...

In his new book, Russell Brand grandly declares: “The Revolution cannot be boring.” Accordingly, his long and winding Revolution (Ballantine Books, 320 pages, $26) mixes comedy and politics, quoting Monty Python and Louis CK alongside the likes of George Orwell and Noam ...

In a recent piece on “the work fetish,” German journalist Patrick Spaet wrote that “Probably no other sentence comes up at a party as often as: ‘So, what do you do?’” Spaet noted that this question contains within it the seeds of another, unspoken inquiry: “Are you ...

The title of British writer and feminist Laurie Penny’s forthcoming book Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution is somewhat curious. Surely nothing is truly unspeakable these days, provided that it attracts clicks and revenue: the market doesn’t much care what ...

In a recent episode of his new show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver featured Australia’s new-ish right wing prime minister, Tony Abbott, in a segment devoted to “Other Countries’ Presidents of the USA.” The show highlighted Abbott’s long history of verbal slip-ups, ...