The Drift Editors
“All Sticks, No Carrots” | An Interview with Adam Tooze
The Drift Editors
In our 2021 conversation with economic historian Adam Tooze, we grappled with what was beginning to feel “a lot like normal life” after the unprecedented shocks of the pandemic. Today, the idea of economic turbulence as exceptional sounds almost quaint. Donald Trump’s second administration seems determined to stress-test nearly every assumption that guided post-pandemic economic policy — not to mention the longstanding international order. To help us understand what these...
“Politics Is Conflictual”
| An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
The Drift Editors
“Massive changes often unfold on large time scales,” philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò told The Drift in 2022. But if the past three years have shown us anything, it’s that they can also happen pretty quickly. Just three years ago, corporations proudly touted their DEI commitments, and a program of climate reparations seemed, if not imminently achievable, at least worth discussing concretely. But the topics we covered in our last conversation...
“We Will Not Win on Our Own” | An Interview with Eman Abdelhadi
The Drift Editors
In April 2024, Columbia’s administration brought in the New York Police Department to dismantle the tents that had been set up by pro-Palestinian protesters occupying the university’s South Lawn. Undeterred, students at over one hundred other campuses across the United States emulated the Columbia activists’ example in the following weeks. Over a year later, colleges are facing retaliation from Trump and his cronies, who relish the opportunity to turn skirmishes...
“Losing Any Claim to Moral Leadership” | An Interview with Nikhil Pal Singh
The Drift Editors
The Drift first spoke with Nikhil Pal Singh at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency, shortly after the January 6 riots. Trump, we wrote in our introduction to that interview, was “finally, dramatically out of office,” and “efforts to historicize his tenure” had “already begun.” At the time, Singh — a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at NYU, founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program,...
“They’re Using Megaphones” | An Interview with Wendy Brown
The Drift Editors
In the first issue of The Drift, we kicked off our interview series with Wendy Brown, one of the foremost political theorists in the United States. That conversation, which took place in between the onset of Covid and the eruption of the George Floyd uprising, largely centered on the role of neoliberal ideology — as articulated by Brown in books like Undoing the Demos (2015) and In the Ruins of...
