What lies beyond the failed utopias of the modernist welfare state and the free market? Gail Pickering's recent film/performance, despite its strictly internal focus on life inside a Brutalist housing estate, opens up scope for speculation. Review by Kate Rich

The English translation of Roberto Esposito’s Bios appears to be an important contribution to the critical analysis of a politics of life, but can the book’s claim to ‘revitalise’ politics really be thought from within the exclusive bounds of academic philosophy? Erik Empson reviews

Contemporary curators are loving the alien, the sacred and the cultic. But far from challenging contemporary social mores, this Other-worship is just an orthodox postmodern denigration of human agency, argues J.J. Charlesworth

Marx’s concept of ‘species being’ is for some a way of re-connecting with fertile currents in the communist left. Howard Slater explores Frére Dupont’s recent book Species Being and Other Stories as a vehicle of exodus from left orthodoxies

But this negation carries within it a yes which is greater than itself

– Octavio Paz

Confirmation that 'Stewart Home' is not alone (so to speak) in populating (anti-)social networking sites with pathological quasi-doubles, incubi, revenants or whatever else.  Cornwall police claim that schoolchildren have been 'impersonating paedophiles' on MSN and Bebo chatrooms in an evil plot to scare 'rival'[sic] kids.  Are these the same chatrooms that the ever-vigilant, Hardworking Families-friendly Guardian recently warned have had their Family Filters hacked to pieces by precocious but somehow still defenceless infants?  And how, exactly, doe

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.