Welcome to The Rift
A newsletter on the crisis of our times.
Welcome to The Rift: a newsletter for critical thinkers who are concerned about the state of the world and trying to make sense of the crisis of our times.
My name is Jerome Roos. I’m a political economist at the London School of Economics, where I specialize in the study of capitalism and the origins of today’s global crisis. Before this, I briefly taught at the University of Cambridge.
My first book, a history of sovereign debt crises, was published by Princeton University Press and won the Immanuel Wallerstein Award for best book on the political economy of the world system. I’ve also written op-eds and longer essays for The Guardian, The New York Times, New Statesman and Al Jazeera English.
I’m currently working on my second book, called CRISIS, which aims to place our age of upheaval within the grand sweep of world history. The Bookseller has called it a “ground-breaking study” and “one of the most talked-about titles ahead of the London Book Fair.” It will be published by Knopf/Vintage in the US and by Fern Press/Vintage in the UK, and is so far set to be translated into twenty languages.
The Rift will be the online companion to this new book: a place where I can try out fresh ideas and share some of my initial findings to provide a more long-term perspective on the crisis of our times.
I believe that we urgently need to move beyond the superficiality of the 24-hour news cycle and the tired social media “discourse” to ask much more profound questions about how we got here and where we are going. I hope that The Rift can offer a creative space for such big-picture thinking.
Above all, the newsletter is motivated by a strong conviction that there is an alternative to the present global disorder. Join me in unearthing the roots of today’s deepening world crisis and exploring the opportunities for transformative change.
What you’ll get
A free subscription will give you:
📬 The main newsletter in your inbox.
🗄️ Access to most of the online archive.
A paid subscription will also get you:
📚 The “3D roundup” of reading tips.
💬 Access to the chat and comments.
📨 The ability to reply to The Rift emails.
Founding members will also receive:
📕 A signed copy of CRISIS when it’s out.
What’s in a name?
In geological terms, a rift refers to a break in the Earth’s crust. It comes about when underlying plate tectonics pull different parts of the lithosphere—the rocky outer layer of our planet—into opposite directions, causing the surface to crack open. In recent years, the visual imagery of tectonic shifts, global rifts and a fracturing world has become a powerful metaphor for our divided societies, our broken political systems, our fragmenting world economy, and today’s rising geopolitical tensions.
At the same time, the Earth itself also suffers the destabilizing effects of capitalist development on the natural environment. This “metabolic rift” has now become the main driving force behind the planetary emergency of climate change, biodiversity loss and mass extinction. For all these reasons, The Rift struck me as an appropriate name for a newsletter on the multidimensional crisis of our times.
But this newsletter is not just about the things that divide us. A rift is also an opening that can lay bare underlying realities and reveal unexpected new vistas onto distant horizons. Understood in this way, The Rift actually refers to a symbolic breach in space and time. It becomes both a site of struggle and a moment of rupture that can push the world system into a different direction. It marks the epochal threshold between an old era that is ending and a new era that is about to begin.
This is the critical juncture at which we find ourselves today. The ground is already shifting beneath our feet. I want The Rift to be an open space where we can work through the implications of these profound changes and collectively rethink the shape of our shared past, our troubled present and our common future. To join our growing community of critical thinkers, make sure to sign up to the newsletter below:
Curious congrats, Jerome!
Awesome!