From Mute, capital needs to sustain the fantasy of its health, efficiency and inevitability at all costs; as the crisis broadsides this fantasy, the spin-doctors are scrambling to reconstruct it; and what lies beyond the failed utopias of the modernist welfare state and the free market? A review of Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East by KE Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. Today the division is no longer between slave and free states, or agrarian and industrial states, but between two models of industrial society. The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism was supposed to encourage sustainable development in poorer countries — but it's now part of the problem. The first chapter from Is Pluto a Planet? A Historical Journey through the Solar System by David A. Weintraub. A review of Crude Continent: The Struggle for Africa's Oil Prize by Duncan Clarke. A review of Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey by Larry A. Hickman. Clay Risen examines France’s backwards sovereign wealth fund. From New Statesman, a review of Globalising Hatred: the New Anti-Semitism by Denis MacShane; a review of A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits by Carol K Mack and Dinah Mack; and are plans to create a game based on Dante's Inferno likely to burn up or be a roaring success?
