Missive #746 Published 30 Jun 2026

Imagine it is 2025. Years earlier, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, a global hi-tech uprising has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratised.

In a thought-experiment of startling originality, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis offers a glimpse of this alternative reality. Through the eyes of three characters - a libertarian ex-banker, a Marxist-feminist and a maverick technologist - we see the genesis of a world without commercial banks or stock markets, where companies are owned equally by all staff, basic income is guaranteed, global imbalances and climate change cancel each other out, and housing is socialised.

Missive #744 Published 27 Jun 2026

Up to one hundred and twenty-five years ago, Niagara Country was, so far as we know, almost constantly the scene of conflict. Strife and violence seem to have been characteristic of the area and as much a part of it as the famous cataracts. This irrevocable fact dominates consideration of the region even when the scene is obscured by the rolling fogs of time. The glimpses of the earliest days, that we are able to see, are of violence and death. Niagara Country may well deserve to be called a dark and bloody land. There were times when the Niagara was stained red from the wounds of men, times when it became the battleground, and other times when it served as the broad highway over which fighters rode to combat and later limped home, nursing their wounds and carrying their dead. The physical character of Niagara seems to have made that inevitable.

Missive #742 Published 23 Jun 2026

In The Future of British Politics, comedian Frankie Boyle takes a characteristically acerbic look at some of the forces that will be key in coming years, from Scottish independence and post-colonial entitlement to big tech surveillance and the looming climate catastrophe. Despite his fears that 'soon the only red tape in this country will be across the finish line of the compulsory Food Bank Olympics', he manages to locate some hopeful signs amid the gloom, reminding us that 'despair is a moment that pretends to be permanent'.

Missive #741 Published 22 Jun 2026

A novel of nine linked parables about globalization, ambition, hope, love, and greed spanning two decades and eight countries.….Merry-Go-Round Broke Down is a genre-breaking novel that explores globalization's "butterfly effect": how choices made in one corner of the world ignited an unstoppable chain of consequences that upended lives across continents.

Missive #738 Published 17 Jun 2026

This Revised New Century Edition provides many new, relevant examples from recent events and contemporary popular culture, including the ever-increasing global proliferation of McDonald′s and other fast food franchises, shopping malls, and similar commercial entities. Their impact is examined in the post-September 11, 2001 era.