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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
I highly recommend the new interview with the historian Ervand Abrahamian in the New Left Review:
…Weber would be surprised to find that the United States, which was supposedly a modern state with an institutionalized bureaucracy, has become a sultanate, where the sultan makes decisions on his own, taking advice from household slaves or servants. That is one thing that strikes me reading the American press, especially the New York Times, which has actually been quite informative about the decisions made in Washington. It’s more like a Marx Brothers movie, the chaos there. The Iranian regime is very different. Despite being led by medieval theocrats, it is highly institutionalized. So even the decapitation of the leadership did not result in the collapse of the regime. I think that’s what the Israelis expected. Three or four days of bombing, they assured Trump, and it would fall. There would be regime change or – and I suspect this is what the Israelis really thought – the country would collapse into civil war. But that did not happen. The institutions survived, and they seem to be quite robust. I’m sure there’s a great deal of personal and political rivalry among the leadership, but they are still invested in preserving their republic.
Since the beginning, it’s been remarkable how the representatives of the Islamic Republic appear—on TV at least—to be totally rational, and all the surrogates and officials of the US government appear to be the raving lunatics. This is what Trump and his people could not understand, partially because they are racist and partially because they are simply unimaginative and stupid: Iran is not a personalistic regime where assassinating a few key figures would make all the difference; it’s a consolidated system staffed with people invested in its existence.
I’d long thought of doing an extended critique of Noam Chomsky, but “Chomsky After Epstein” by Alex Gendler in Strange Matters does a far better job than I ever could:
