The Extreme Centre

“Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist.”
—Observer

“The typical Financial Times reader might find his bias so irksome they cannot continue. This would be a pity.”
—Financial Times

“For years, left-wing critics have framed the debate. Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Marc Mauer and, more recently, Michelle Alexander gave us the terminology to speak about all this: the prison industrial complex, abolition, non-reform reform and The New Jim Crow … [Ali’s theorized term ‘extreme center’] provides us with a new language to describe our problems … One of the key tasks of the extreme center is to take center stage, to ensure that no alternative seems either reasonable or possible.”
—James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of our Era, in Counterpunch

 “A sharp polemic against greed, inequality and our flailing democratic system whose engine is the EU.”
—Libération

 “Ali spins metaphors, re-establishes certain truths, shines a light on issues shrouded in ignorance. He enthralls, entertains, instructs. This is high art.”
—Le Figaro

“Ali is indeed a kind of professional, or inveterate heretic, a writer who has made a career of dissenting from every kind of orthodoxy.”
—Robyn Creswell, The National

 “Ali is smart as fire.”
—Ian Epstein, New City