Books & the Arts

How Federal Housing Programs Failed Black America

In Race for Profit, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor shows how even those housing policies that sought to create more Black homeowners were stymied by racism and a determination to shrink the government’s presence.

Marcia Chatelain

How Did the Internet Get So Bad?

Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, an account of the last 30 years of online life, reminds us the Internet didn't have to become what it is today.

Lisa Borst

Eric Posner’s Democracy for the Few

A conservative gadfly joins “the Resistance.”

Samuel Moyn

From the Magazine

Julian Bond’s Life in Protest and Politics

A new collection of essays demonstrates how the civil rights icon’s thinking evolved amid the upheavals of the 20th century.

Robert Greene II

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

Moses Sumney’s Songs of Freedom

His immersive album græ explores the costs of personal and artistic autonomy.

Stephen Kearse

Literary Criticism

J.M. Coetzee’s States of Exile

In writing an allegory that is barely an allegory and a trilogy of novels that are often not novels, Coetzee appears to have made his own literary displacement total. 

Siddhartha Deb

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

How Does One Tell the Story of Asian America?

Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings grapples with the contradictions of Asian American experience in order to tell a story of solidarity.

Jane Hu

History & Politics

The Inner Life of American Communism

Vivian Gornick’s and Jodi Dean’s books mine a lost history of comradeship, determination, and intimacy.

Corey Robin

A Century of Struggle in Palestine

Rashid Khalidi’s new history offers a political and personal portrait of more than a hundred years of colonization and resistance in Palestine.

Kaleem Hawa

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

Literature

The Radical Afterlives of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

The South Korean–born author of Dictée was killed at 31. Four decades later, her landmark experimental novel is poised for wider rediscovery.
Mayukh Sen

In 1980, when she was 29, the South Korean–born artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha moved from the Bay Area to New York. She hated the city. After two years there, she wrote that achieving success would require her to accept the “dregs of morals, money, parasitic existence.” To… Continue Reading >

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Television and Films

On the Record’s Act of Witness

Telling the stories of three women who accused Russell Simmons of sexual assault, the documentary is a powerful case study in how institutions have failed Black women.

Stephen Kearse

The Tangle of Desire and Class in ‘Normal People’

The television adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel depicts how people can fall in love in a world structured by power.

Erin Schwartz

Shaking Up Your Perceptions

How films chosen for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival test the limits of both authority and documentary filmmaking.

Stuart Klawans

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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