What about Intellectual Fare? The state of English-speaking journals and mags

It’s some 5 years since I last did an annotated list of interesting journals, As the number of newspaper titles shrinks, the number of weekly, monthly and even quarterly journals seems to increase - although substack is now offering a highly competitive (paying) model which may challenge their future.

My question then was - which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- sceptical in tone

That’s a tough test but this was the list -

3 Quarks Daily; I last said “my daily fix - an amazing site which offers carefully chosen articles which suit my demanding taste perfectly” but I don’t actually receive it any more. But Nous y verrons

Aeon; an impressive cultural journal (online since 2012) whose articles are about big issues and have real “zing”

Arts and Letters Daily; this daily internet service highlights an article and book but I’ve only recently resubscribed.

Boston Review; a mag I rate highly for originality

Brave New Europe; greatly improved site which contains essential reading for leftists such as this conversation between Varoufakis and Jeffrey Sachs

Consortium News; a leftist radical US site

Current affairs; a bi-monthly and slightly anarchistic American mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Dublin Review of Books; great crack

Eurozine; a network of some 90 European cultural mags which gives a great sense of the diversity of European writing

Jacobin; a leftist mag which has improved with age.

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian.

Literary Hub; a literary site with daily selections but one, for some reason, I haven’t looked at recently

London Review of Books; my favourite for the past 40 years to which I generally subscribe

Los Angeles Review of Books; tries too hard to run with the politically correct

Marginalia; gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. a personal endeavour of a Bulgarian woman now living in the States which, recently, I’ve found it a bit too predictable 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; a centrist mag published only 3 times a year

New Humanist; an important monthly strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE UK leftist journal publishing every 2 months since 1960. Always worth a look 

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth centrist UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate

Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; dependable UK Green mag

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

Soundings; if you want to keep up with UK leftist thought, this is the journal for you – issued only 3 times a year

Spiked; a libertarian net-based journal with challenging articles always guaranteed to be anti-PC

Sydney Review of Books; still can’t make up my mind

The Alternative UK; an excellent new platform aimed at establishing a "friendly revolution" to transform politics - it actually gives  space to interesting new thinkers

The Atlantic; one of the US oldest mags (founded in 1857)

The Baffler; great writing. Apparently founded in 1988, it surfaced for me only recently

The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists 

The Cultural Tutor; an amazing site which offers each week a taste of music, literature and architecture – produced by Sheehan Quirke

The Nation; America's oldest (1865) weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Republic Progressive US monthly which has been publishing for more than a century

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing

The New York Review of Books; I used to love this journal but have not renewed my sub – partly in protest about what’s happening in US politics

The Point;  a quiet rightist mag

Tribune; the original left paper for which Orwell wrote and to which I am currently subscribed. Has some great writers such as Owen Hatherley and Grace Blakely

Verfassungs blog; an excellent Anglo-German site which focuses on constitutional issues

Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

Words without Borders; a journal of translation

Wrong Side of History; Ed West writes that “every writer has an axe, or multiple axes to grind, and I’m obviously politically conservative – although I would more describe myself as a depressive realist – but I’m not anti-liberal. Liberalism works in certain circumstances, but it needs saving from itself. If there’s a campaigning theme to Wrong Side of History, it’s my belief that there is a political drift towards a form of soft totalitarianism, which includes a fixation with inserting activism into every aspect of our lives, whether it’s sport, education or visiting a cultural attraction. I want less politics in our daily lives”

Substack favourites

Aurelien; very thoughtful posts

Chris Hedges Report; the guy who rivals Chomsky

Critical perspectives; rigorous international research revealing how global systems actually shape our world- from Rex McKenzie

The long memo; posts on politics, collapse, and the architecture of exit by William Finnegan

Thoughts from the shire; highly literary thoughts from a wee Hobbit trying to escape clown world

https://www.kitklarenberg.com/; a male investigative journalist explores global risks

https://athenamac83.substack.com/; Anthropologist and a rare female author, specializing in bioethics and anthropogenic existential risk.

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century and to which I have recommenced an (internet) sub. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – with Eurozine takes the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 90 cultural journals

The archive on journalism

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/03/investigative-journalism.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/07/british-bread-oz-circus-and-bulgarian.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-big-brother.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/04/suborning-democracy.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/confessionals.html Pat Chalmers
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-british-journalism-dead.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/05/journals-worth-reading.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-journalists.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sense-of-global-crisis.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/brexit-and-reassertion-of-nation-state.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-writers-craft.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/kenneth-roy-voice-to-renew-faith-in.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-stuff-of-journalism.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-praise-of-literary-magazines.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-does-brexit-tell-us-about-ourselves.html

Emmanuel Todd - French anthropologist - continued

 The last post excerpted from a lecture this famous writer recently delivered in Moscow. It was, however, only the beginning – it continues -

In “The Defeat of the West”, I explain that religious void, the zero stage of religion,

leads to anxiety rather than a state of freedom and well-being. The zero stage 

brings us back to the fundamental problem. What does it mean to be human? 

What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a period 

of religious collapse, is nihilism. We move from the fear of emptiness to the 

deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a desire to 

destroy things, people, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself 

something serious in a moral sense, but it is fundamental in an intellectual sense 

because to say that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a 

desire to destroy reality. 
This, in association with cancel culture and a preference for war, was one element 

in the nihilism that prevailed under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all of that.

However, what strikes me at the moment is the emergence of a nihilism that takes 

other forms: a desire to destroy science and academia, the black middle classes, 

or disorderly violence in the application of the American protectionist strategy. 
When Trump thoughtlessly wants to establish tariffs between Canada and the United 

States, even though the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, 

I see this as an impulse toward destruction as much as protection. When I see Trump 

suddenly imposing protectionist tariffs on China, forgetting that most American smartphones 

are made in China, I tell myself that we cannot simply dismiss this as stupidity. It is 

foolishness, certainly, but it may also be nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: 

Trump's fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is 

typically a high-intensity nihilistic project.

The fundamental contradiction in American policy leads protectionism to failure. The 

theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country has the skilled 

population that would allow it to benefit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will 

only be effective if you have engineers, scientists and skilled technicians. 

The Americans do not have enough of these. Yet I see the United States starting to 

chase away its Chinese students, and so many others, the very people who enable it to 

compensate for its shortage of engineers and scientists. This is absurd. 

The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or revive 

industry if the state intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. 

Yet we see the Trump administration attacking the state, the very state that should be 

nurturing scientific research and technological progress. Worse still, if we look for the 

motivation behind the fight against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we 

realise that it is not even economic.
Those who are familiar with American history know the crucial role of the federal government 

in the emancipation of Black people. Hatred of the federal government in the United States 

most often stems from anti-Black resentment. When you fight against the American 

federal government, you are fighting against the central administrations that emancipated 

and still protect Black people. A high proportion of the Black middle class has found 

employment in the federal government. The fight against the federal government is therefore 

not part of a general vision of economic and national reconstruction.
When I think of the multiple and contradictory actions of the Trump administration, the 

word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose outcome is somewhat unclear.

Absolute nuclear family + zero religion = atomisation
I am very pessimistic about the United States. To conclude this exploratory lecture, I will 

return to my fundamental concepts as a historian and social anthropologist. I said at the 

beginning of this lecture that the fundamental reason why I believed, quite early on, as 

early as 2002, that Russia would return to stability was because I was aware of the 

existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, 

I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's 

return to stability. I see a family-based, community-based culture, with its values of authority 

and equality, which also helps us to understand a little about what the nation means to 

Russians. There is indeed a connection between the form of the family and the idea of 

the nation that people hold. The communitarian family nourishes a strong, compact idea 

of the nation or the people. Such is Russia.
In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we have the opposite situation. 

The English and American family model is nuclear, individualistic. The nuclear family 

certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations in that system follow one another 

while remaining separate. The rapid adaptation of the United States and England, and 

the plasticity of their social structures (which enabled the English Industrial Revolution 

and the American boom) were made possible by this absolute nuclear family structure.
But alongside or above this individualistic family structure, both England and the United 

States had the discipline of Protestantism, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, 

as a structuring factor, was crucial to the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. 

The zero state of religion, combined with family values that provide very little structure, 

does not seem to me to be an anthropological and historical combination that could lead 

to stability. The Anglo-American world is heading towards ever greater atomisation. 

This atomisation can only lead to an accentuation, with no visible limit, of American decadence. 

I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor.

Unfortunately, I can now only find one additional negative factor, which came to my attention 

when reading a book by Amy Chua, a Yale academic who was J.D. Vance's mentor - 

Political Tribes, Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) highlights, as many other 

texts have done before it, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation,

founded on the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values 

that transcend ethnicity. Admittedly, this was the official theory from very early on. 

But there was also a dominant white Protestant group in the United States, which itself 

had a fairly long and ordinary ethnic history.

Since the fragmentation of the Protestant group, the American nation has become truly 

post-ethnic, a purely ‘civic’ nation, theoretically united by its attachment to its 

constitution and values. Amy Chua's fear is that America will revert to what she calls 

tribalism. 

A regressive fragmentation.
Each of the European nations is, at its core, regardless of its family structure, religious 

tradition, or vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, 

with its own language and culture, a people rooted in history. Each has a stable foundation. 

The Russians have it, the Germans have it, the French have it, even if they are a little 

strange at the moment when it comes to these concepts. America no longer has it. 

A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation deprived of morality 

by the zero state of religion is mind-boggling. It even sends a chill down your spine.
My personal fear is that we are not at the end, but only at the beginning of a downfall of 

the United States that will reveal to us things we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: 

not in an American empire, whether triumphant, weakened or destroyed, but in new things 

we cannot imagine.

Other Todd Material
The Final Fall – an essay on the decomposition of the soviet sphere  Emmanuel Todd 

(1976Fr-79Eng)
The Causes of Progress – culture, authority and change Emmanuel Tod (1987) 
After the Empire – the breakdown of the American order Emmanuel Todd (2003) 
Lineages of Modernity – a history of humanity from the stone age to homo Americanus 

Emmanuel Todd (2018)

When the English language first appeared in the fourteenth century, its kingdom of 3 million inhabitants was just a tiny peripheral country on the edge of a Eurasia that had a population of 300 million. This language is now unifying the world. The Anglosphere – the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – is characterized not only by its language, but by an individualistic family structure, and by a corresponding social and political temperament: in 2018–19 it had more than 450 million inhabitants. British globalization in the nineteenth century, followed by American globalization in the twentieth, generated a worldwide economic organization. Yet Britain remains an island and continues to amaze Europeans with its particularism – its habit of driving on the left, its royal family, its humour, its general refusal to conform. Solving the paradox of a culture that is not only tiny but particularistic, one that created the United States and shaped the world, is the central focus of this book.

La Defaite de l’Occident Emmanuel Todd (2024)

From Russia with Love

Today I want to draw my readers’ attention to the work of the French writer Emmanuel Todd who has the reputation of being astonishingly prescient as he recounts in this post from Russia where he was delivering a lecture about his new book “Defeat of the West” which I will download in the next few days (although be warned – it’s in French)

In France, I am what you would call a left-wing liberal, fundamentally attached to 

liberal democracy. What distinguishes me from people attached to liberal democracy 

is that, because I am a social anthropologist, because I know the diversity of the world 

through the analysis of family systems, I have a great tolerance for outside cultures 

and I don't start from the principle that everyone must imitate the West. 

The bias towards knowing-it-all is particularly traditional in Paris. I believe that every 

country has its own history, culture and path. 
The first history books I read, when I was 16, were about the Red Army's war against 

Nazism. I have the feeling of a debt that must be honoured. I would add that I am 

aware that Russia emerged from communism on its own, through its own efforts, and 

that it suffered enormously during the transition period. I believe that the defensive 

war that the West forced Russia into, after all that suffering, just as it was getting back 

on its feet, is a moral failure on the part of the West. So much for the ideological, or 

rather emotional, dimension. As for the rest, I am not an ideologue, I don't have a 

programme for humanity, I'm a historian, I'm a social anthropologist, I consider myself 

a scientist and what I can contribute to the understanding of the world and in particular 

to geopolitics comes essentially from my occupational skills.

Then, at Cambridge, I had as my thesis internal examiner another great British historian, 

who is still alive, Alan Macfarlane. He had understood that there was a link between the 

political and economic individualism of the British (and therefore of Anglo-Saxons in 

general) and the nuclear family identified by Peter Laslett in England's past. 

I am the student of these two great British historians. Fundamentally, I generalised 

Macfarlane's hypothesis. I realised that the map of communism at is peak, around the 

mid-1970s, looked very much like the map of a family system that I call communitarian 

(which others have called patriarchal family, or joint-family), a family system that is somehow 

the conceptual opposite of the British family system.

He then emphasises his work as a researcher -

I'd like to make one thing clear about my reputation. 95% of my life as a researcher has been devoted to the analysis of family structures, a subject on which I have written books of 500 to 700 pages. But that's not what I'm best known for in the world. I am known for three geopolitical essays in which I used my knowledge of this anthropological background to understand what was going on. In 1976, I published “The Final Fall - an essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere” in which I predicted the collapse of communism. The fall in the fertility rate of Russian women showed that the Russians were people like everybody else, in the process of modernising, and that no homo sovieticus had been created by communism. Above all, I had identified an increase in infant mortality between 1970 and 1974 in Russia and Ukraine. The rise in mortality among children under one year of age showed that the system had begun to deteriorate. I wrote that first book very young, when I was 25, and I had to wait about 15 years for my prediction to come true.

In 2002, I wrote a second geopolitical book, “After the Empire – the breakdown of the American 

order”, at a time when everyone was talking about the American hyperpower. We were 

told that America was going to dominate the world for an indefinite period, a unipolar 

world. I was saying the opposite: no, the world is too big, America's relative size is 

shrinking economically and America will not be able to control this world. That proved to 

be true. 
In After the Empire, there is a particularly correct prediction that surprises even me. 

One chapter is called ‘The Return of Russia’. In it, I predict Russia's return as a major power, 

but on the basis of very few clues. I had only observed a resumption of the fall in infant 

mortality (between 1993 and 1999, after a rise between 1990 and 1993). But I knew 

instinctively that the Russian communitarian cultural background, which had produced 

communism in a transitional phase, was going to survive the period of anarchy of the 1990s, 

and that it constituted a stable structure that would enable something to be rebuilt.
There is however a huge mistake in this book: I predict in it an autonomous destiny for 

Western Europe. And there's an omission: I don't mention China.

This brings me to my latest geopolitical book, which I think will be my last, “La Défaite de 

l'Occident” (The Defeat of the West). It is in order to talk about this book  that I am here in 

Moscow. It predicts that, in the geopolitical confrontation opened up by the entry of the 

Russian army into Ukraine, the West will suffer a defeat. Once again I appear in opposition 

to the general opinion of my country, or my side since I am a Westerner. I will first say 

why it was easy for me to write this book, but then I would like to try to explain why, now 

that the defeat of the West seems certain, it has become much more difficult for me to 

explain in the short term the process of dislocation of the West, while still being able to 

make a long-term prediction about the continuation of the American decline.
We are at a turning point: we are moving from defeat to dislocation. What makes me cautious 

is my past experience of the collapse of the Soviet system. I had predicted this collapse 

but I have to admit that when the Soviet system actually collapsed, I wasn't able to foresee 

the extent of the dislocation and the level of suffering that this dislocation would entail for 

Russia.
I hadn't understood that communism was not just an economic organisation but also a 

belief, a quasi-religion, structuring social life in Russia and the Soviet Union. 

The dislocation of belief was going to lead to a psychological disorganisation far beyond 

the economic disorganisation. We are reaching a similar situation in the West today. 

What we are experiencing is not simply a military failure and an economic failure, but a 

dislocation of the beliefs that had organised social life in the West for several decades.

The core of my thinking is referred to in the title of my book, La Défaite de l'Occident 

(The Defeat of the West). It's not Russia's victory, it's the defeat of the West that I'm 

studying. I think that the West is destroying itself.
To put forward and demonstrate this hypothesis, I also had a number of indicators. 

I'm going to confine myself here to the United States. I had been working for a long time 

on the evolution of the United States. I knew about the destruction of the American 

industrial base, particularly since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. 

I knew how difficult it would be for the United States to produce enough weapons to fuel 

the war.
I had managed to estimate the number of engineers - people dedicated to making real things 

- in the United States and Russia. I came to the conclusion that Russia, with a population 

two and a half less numerous than that of the United States, was able to produce more 

engineers. Quite simply because only 7% of American students study engineering, whereas 

the figure in Russia is close to 25%. Of course, the number of engineers should be seen 

as a general indicator, which refers in greater depth to technicians, skilled workers and a 

general industrial capacity.
I had other long-term indicators for the United States. I had been working for decades on 

the decline in the level of education, on the decline in the quality and quantity of American 

higher education, a decline that began as early as 1965.

Other References

https://emmanueltodd.substack.com/

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine

https://ednews.net/en/news/world/641606-emmanuel-todd-are-witnessing-the