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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.
In the Los Angeles Reviews of Books, Mathias Fuelling has a review of Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics:
ANTON JÄGER’S Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences (2026) is a strange book: too short to offend, too long to be pithy or aphoristic. The effect is to make it flat. Jäger is explosively erudite, yet this erudition leads to banal ends, loud bangs that come to small talk. He is a superstar on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and the book captures Jäger’s charisma within a particular online socialist milieu—the wide-ranging references, close attunement to political events in Europe, and a gift for the incisive turn of phrase. Jäger’s insights are often provocative and penetrating, drawing on a wealth of comparative knowledge and a willingness to take intellectual risks, but they are left undeveloped, discarded as soon as they are expressed.
In the preface, he compares the current Democratic Party to an “inverted Peronist developmental bloc.” Further in, he tells us that “the KKK and other [American] white-supremacist groups might well count among the first properly fascist organizations in history.” Near the end, he notes of the culture wars during the Trump era that “OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries found themselves engulfed in a kind of permanent Dreyfus Affair, one that extended to family gatherings, circles of friends, and workplace cliques,” and that “the average Western European today is more likely to interact with geriatric nurses than workplace union reps.” Quips and analogies such as these can be found on almost every page, but what do they add up to?
Hyperpolitics can be seen as a hip remix of Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” for the early 21st century, with Trump in the role of Louis, though at its heart, it is less of an argument than a heuristic model. In the absence of efficacious class struggle over the now decades-long nadir of socialism, according to Jäger, we have ended up in an ersatz version of history in Europe and the United States, characterized by four succeeding waves of macropolitical orientations. A mass politics defined a period from the 19th century to the end of the Cold War, which marked the height of movements organized along social bases such as class. The triumphant globalization of the 1990s saw the rise of postpolitics, “in which citizens retreat from collective life into the private sphere.” An antipolitics emerged in response to the 2008 financial crisis, with people returning to politics but in a landscape “marked by the erosion—or even accelerated disintegration—of social bonds.” Since the initial election of Donald Trump, a hyperpolitics has taken hold, with people ever more politicized, but in a fractured environment inadequate for the mobilization of this political energy.
I was working on my own review of Hyperpolitics, but it was taking me so long that the magazine I was doing it for didn’t want it anymore, so I may just post it on here soon.
For my piece this past week on techne and phronesis, I revisited Hannah Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Culture.” There are so many great passages and lines it’s difficult to pull just one:
