Books & the Arts
Olga Ravn’s Office Novel in Space
The Employees offers a surreal and biting account of all the hazards and indignities of the contemporary workplace.
Jessica LoudisThe British Empire’s Worldwide Devastation
Caroline Elkins’s new history of the British Empire is a damning account of its violent crimes against its subjects.
Howard W. FrenchThe Sea According to Rachel Carson
Her first three books were odes to the world’s bodies of water and their creative power over all life forms.
Hannah GoldFrom the Magazine
Me Too and the Not Me Novel
Julia May Jonas’s new novel is a study of a campus scandal and a woman caught in the middle of it.
Laura Marsh
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Abolition Democracy
The enduring legacy and capacious vision of Black Reconstruction.
Gerald Horne
Nijinska’s Revolutionary Vision of Dance
Lynn Garafola’s biography of the dancer and choreographer charts her globetrotting life and radical art.
Jennifer WilsonLiterary Criticism
The Ambitious and Overstuffed World of Hanya Yanagihara
To Paradise attempts to break out of the common insularity of contemporary fiction, but in doing so it often ends up focusing more on the author.
Tope Folarin
John Keene’s Poetry of Others
In Punks, the self is never static and cannot exist outside its relationships to others.
Ken Chen
Jennifer Egan’s World Wide Web
Her latest novel tackles a favorite topic of her fiction—the excesses of the Internet and modern technologies.
Erin SomersB&A Newsletter
History & Politics
The Many American Revolutions
Woody Holton’s Liberty is Sweet charts not only the contest with Great Britain over “home rule” but also the internal struggle over who should rule at home.
Eric Foner
Cedric Robinson’s Radical Democracy
Rejecting the resignation of the 1970s and ’80s, Robinson found hope and resistance in the ruins of the American city.
Jared Loggins
What Is Left of History?
Joan Scott’s On the Judgment of History asks us to imagine the past without the idea of progress. But what gets left out in the process?
David A. BellHigher Education
Has the Pandemic Pushed Universities to the Brink?
Covid has turned the gap between universities and colleges serving mainly privileged students and those serving needy ones into a chasm and it is unclear if the latter will be able to survive.
Andrew DelbancoIn January 2020, just days before the first case of Covid-19 was identified in the United States, Bryan Alexander, a scholar at Georgetown University known as a “futurist,” published a new book, Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Alexander made no claim to clairvoyance, only to “trend analysis and… Continue Reading >
Television and Films
Kanye the Careerist
A three-part Netflix documentary on the rapper’s rise unintentionally shows the depths of West’s cynicism.
Jordan Coley
Nadav Lapid’s Cinema of Shame
His new film Ahed’s Knee is a shallow cri de coeur against the Israeli state.
Kaleem Hawa
The Hollow Narrative of HBO’s “Gilded Age”
The TV show is guilty of the greatest crime any fiction about the 19th century can commit—not getting it wrong, but making it dull.
Jake BittleTheater
The Making of Tom Stoppard
How mistaken identity and acts of reinvention define the life and work of the British playwright.
Hannah GoldTom Stoppard has long been averse to weaving explicitly autobiographical material into his plays, so it’s only appropriate that one of his more revealing lines about himself would be voiced by a 19th-century liberal literary critic. The speech, which appears in Voyage, the first of Stoppard’s trilogy on the Russian… Continue Reading >
Poems
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May 24, 2022
Snow Maze
Dorothea Lasky -
May 24, 2022
the poet defends his right to a future and demands its immediate redistribution
Raquel Salas Rivera -
May 17, 2022
Currency Communion
Eduardo “Echo” Martinez -
January 27, 2022
The Sublime Ironies of John Ashbery
Does his first posthumous collection, Parallel Movement of the Hands, help answer the riddle of his poetic project?
Ryan Ruby
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