Books & the Arts
Fernanda Melchor’s Dark Morality Plays
In her third novel, Melchor turns her allegorical powers in an even more explicitly political direction.
Nicolás Medina MoraThe Reflections of Kendrick Lamar
His intimate new album Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers lifts a mirror to his listeners.
Joshua BennettThe Brutal Verisimilitude of “The Northman”
Robert Eggers’s latest work, a Viking epic, pushes his obsessive and detail-oriented filmmaking to its limit.
Erin SchwartzFrom the Magazine

Nijinska’s Revolutionary Vision of Dance
Lynn Garafola’s biography of the dancer and choreographer charts her globetrotting life and radical art.
Jennifer Wilson
Hubert Harrison, Giant of Harlem Radicalism
A two-volume biography tracks the life and times of one of Harlem’s leading socialists.
Robert Greene II
Andrea Stewart-Cousins Is Albany’s Best Hope
The New York State Senate’s new majority leader is championing women’s rights—and giving Governor Andrew Cuomo a piece of her mind.
Raina LipsitzLiterary 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
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 MarshB&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

Does “Severance”’s Workplace Satire Work?
On the ups and downs of the year's most talked-about office drama.
Vikram Murthi
The Brutal Verisimilitude of “The Northman”
Robert Eggers’s latest work, a Viking epic, pushes his obsessive and detail-oriented filmmaking to its limit.
Erin Schwartz
Nadav Lapid’s Cinema of Shame
His new film Ahed’s Knee is a shallow cri de coeur against the Israeli state.
Kaleem HawaTheater

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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June 7, 2022
Late December in Abidjan
Romeo Oriogun -
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
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