And if you thought fashion-talk might offer some light relief from the horrors of the death railway, think again. Tansy Hoskins’ recently released book Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashiondelves into the grimy underbelly of the beauty-obsessed industry: exposing the class division, gender stereotyping and wasteful consumption plaguing the world of fashion. If you own a closet and keep garments in it, it behooves you to take note of this insightful indictment of the distorting priorities of capitalism.
capitalism
Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism
Do you know what money is? You might think you do, but you probably don’t. You’ve actually probably never thought about it properly before. So here’s Ole Bjerg to the rescue, whose book Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism, delves into the big questions—what is money? where does it come from? who makes it? (not me, sigh)—and argues that we have entered a phase of “post-credit capitalism.” According to Slavoj Žižek, it’s an “explosive” read, “an absolutely indispensable guide through the labyrinth of economics” (it also happens to draw on Žižek’s theories). Join The Cultures of Finance Group at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge, as they celebrate the US launch of the book with a panel discussion. (And you won’t have to spend any of the green stuff.)