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

By supporting NGOs, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere?

I'm posting Brecht's poem 'A Worker’s Speech To A Doctor' to draw attention to the recent publication of a pamphlet by the Radical History Network of North East London, The NHS IS 60: undervalued, under-funded, undermined.

Variant, one of the few magazines covering the grim process of stealth privatisation of Glasgow's cultural assets, appears to have been specifically targeted by one of the very privateers it criticised, and who has banned its distribution at Tramway gallery, in a highly defensive abuse of power: