Books & the Arts

The Past and Future of Latinx Politics

Two new books look at the history of Latinx Democrats and Republicans and the role each will play in the future.

Ed Morales

Maria Reva’s Mordant and Profound Fiction

In her short story collection, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, Reva documents the chaos, joy, and serendipity of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Jennifer Wilson

Run the Jewels’ Wake-up Call

While other mainstream rappers might create one song or one album dedicated to the unrest, Killer Mike and El-P have carried that torch for six years.

Marcus J. Moore

From the Magazine

The Troubling Origins of Birthright Politics

Two new works of history examine how the politics of birthright citizenship can be a vehicle for liberation and equality and serve the cause of exclusion.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

The Racist Roots of New Technology

From facial recognition to VR, Ruha Benjamin’s new book illuminates how cutting-edge tech reproduces inequalities.

Stephen Kearse

Sarah Broom’s New Orleans Saga

In her new memoir, Broom reconstructs not only her family’s history in New Orleans but also the larger arc of black experience in the South.

Lovia Gyarkye

History & Politics

How Should Unions Organize?

In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey makes the case for strike-ready unions and whole worker organizing. But in an age of globalized economies and climate change, is this enough?

E. Tammy Kim

The Making of the Radical Republicans

How did the struggle for emancipation become a mass politics?

Eric Foner

The Worlds of Edward Said

An exile who made the world his home, Said infused his literary style with a cosmopolitan ease and his political commitments with a cosmopolitan ethics.

Rashid Khalidi

Politics and Literature

Lorraine Hansberry’s Radicalism

For the playwright and activist, neither liberal reform nor countercultural art were enough. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. 
Elias Rodriques

In October of 1964, three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway. At the time, Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had not been kind. Shingles racked her… Continue Reading >

Literary Criticism

The Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez

His fiction and nonfiction can be seen as facets of a single, lifelong narrative enterprise.

Tony Wood

Lauren Wilkinson’s Novel of Race, Empire, and Espionage

American Spy examines the intersections between spycraft and living in America as a black person.

Jennifer Wilson

Mary Gaitskill’s Art of Loneliness

Through her portraits of solitude, Gaitskill forces us to recognize those moments of subtle connection.

Maggie Doherty
Ad Policy

Television and Films

Kelly Reichardt’s Anti-Capitalist Vision of Frontier America

Her latest film, First Cow, challenges the myths of Americana by telling the stories of peripheral, ordinary figures.

Phoebe Chen

Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’ Is a Startling Study of Power

As the contemporary film landscape heralds the coming of a class war, Diop’s beautiful movie reckons with capital and labor in groundbreaking fashion.

Namwali Serpell

The Beautiful, Baffling Mysteries of Paolo Sorrentino’s Vatican

His television series, The Young Pope and The New Pope, tell us a story bigger than one focused on just church or state.

Erin Schwartz

History

How Silicon Valley Broke the Economy

The question of how to fix the tech industry is now inseparable from the question of how to fix the system of capitalism that the late 20th century gave us.
Adrian Chen

One of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs’s most audacious marketing triumphs is rarely mentioned in the paeans to his genius that remain a staple of business content farms. In 1982, Jobs offered to donate a computer to every K–12 school in America, provided Congress pass a bill giving Apple substantial tax… Continue Reading >

Poems

Editor's Picks

The Workers That Built America

William P. Jones

Is Our Food Culture Killing Us?

Susan Pedersen

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