This article, The United States: The Slide Toward Disorder (it was sent to me by a long friend and intellectual ally, James Latteier), lucidly (if not beautifully) explains the current order of things. It also gets to heart of what we at this paper call the Urban Archipelago , a theory that was repeated in The Nation recently and is in need of deeper consideration and greater elaboration, if it is to be of use to the future. I wish, however, the author of The Slide Toward Disorder, Golub, was a little more to the left. I still stand by Negri and Hardt’s Marxist analysis of late-20th century globalisation, Empire, which Golub contends is disproved by the rise of the nationalistic right in the US—the greatest benefactor of the denationalised global economy of the 90s. But philosopher Nic Veroli and I confronted Hardt on that very subject three years ago (the entire interview was published in the academic journal Radical Society) and he gave a reasonable explanation to the troubling (or contradictory) trend. The left are still correct; it is still a matter of finding “new weapons.”