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If Shell isn’t willing to plan to lose money, should we expect the Société des Hydrocarbures du Tchad to behave differently? The largest economies hope not, because they’ve continued investing tens of billions of dollars a year to finance oil and gas projects in poor nations.25 It’s nonsensical to …

It’s easy to see how individuals are recruited—volunteer themselves, even—into projects that are hostile to their own existence.vii After all, every worker already does the same thing by definition, to a certain degree. Think back to the Shell example. No one wants to work at an underregulated oil …

“We don’t plan to lose money,” the Shell analyst told me. When I met him, he was a young man, still completing his transition from geoscientist to bean counter. We talked over drinks as he explained how he ended up working at the multinational oil conglomerate—Shell acquired the small firm where he…

Thompson addresses Wallace's markings in his copy of Tolstoy's What Is Art? that highlight a passage in which Tolstoy says: "but [art] is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of human…

This idea, that by being self-conscious about the way one observes and describes the everyday— the concrete and virtual environments of late 20th-century consumer capitalist society might constitute an ethical process is a long way from Lukács's idea that the only valid kind of fiction is that whic…