Books & the Arts

Olga Ravn’s Office Novel in Space

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 Loudis

The 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. French

The 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 Gold

From the Magazine

Me Too and the Not Me Novel

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

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

Nijinska’s Revolutionary Vision of Dance

Lynn Garafola’s biography of the dancer and choreographer charts her globetrotting life and radical art. 

Jennifer Wilson

Literary Criticism

The Ambitious and Overstuffed World of Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

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 Somers

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History & Politics

The Many American Revolutions

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

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?

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. Bell

Higher Education

Has the Pandemic Pushed Universities to the Brink?

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 Delbanco

In 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 >

Ad Policy

Television and Films

Kanye the Careerist

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

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 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 Bittle

Theater

The Making of Tom Stoppard

The Making of Tom Stoppard

How mistaken identity and acts of reinvention define the life and work of the British playwright.
Hannah Gold

Tom 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

Editor's Picks

The Rise of Adjunct Lit

The Rise of Adjunct Lit

Maggie Doherty
Graham Greene’s God

Graham Greene’s God

John Banville

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