“Why read and write about literature while the world burns?” Because, in working to end the oppression faced by so many, the humanities can help.
Essays
Public Picks 2021
Each May we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year (or so).
The Perspective Is the Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.
The Asian American Novel in Our Time of Hate
What does it mean to write—and read—an American novel in the wake of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes, events connected to a history of Asian exclusion?
Meritocracy Is a Dystopia
Netflix Brazil’s3%presents a desperate future city that nevertheless proclaims its citizens all have an equal shot at success. Sound familiar?
Imperialism: A Syllabus
Opposition to imperialism unites the struggles of our times. To recognize empire is to take a necessary step towards a more just world.
Energy “Realism” Is Climate Fatalism
Americans may not want to hear this, but it might be best if the US is not the country leading the world through the climate crisis.
Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?
How to Educate an American Citizen
What should schools teach about the Constitution? And should they teach feelings, aspiration, or fact?
No Escape
What if comfort TV brought no comfort? Even the most innocuous shows can transform into horror, when the monster of racism bursts onto the scene.
What’s in a Bookstore?
For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.
Spatial Abolition and Disability Justice
Revealing the multiple histories of disability justice can expand how we think of and design the places we build.
Electric Laboratory
“已经放置的隔间round how we understand slavery and genocide and its impact on our lives and the world?”
Haiti’s New Political Worlds
Throughout its history, residents of Haiti, especially those of African descent, imagined and created their own possibilities for new social worlds.
Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
Politics—Not Psychology—Drives Politics
Social psychologists know conservative media politicizes its viewers. But by focusing on individuals, they miss how to enact political change.
Stories of Soil, Soy, and Life Otherwise
What happens when thinking of soil as a living being and force, with whom the human world needs to repair and rebuild ties?
Literary and Manual Labors: Pittsfield, Massachusetts
“I have been building some shanties of houses …,” wrote Melville to Hawthorne, “and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays.”
Urban Democracy’s Documentarian
How to explain the miracle of an institution as gargantuan, complex, and pivotal to society as “government”? Watch Frederick Wiseman’sCity Hall.
Apartheid’s Paper Trail
Why did some Black South Africans directly collaborate with their oppressors, and what was their experience like?