Books & the Arts
Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics
In her new book, Applebaum attempts to understand why some of her intellectual bedfellows moved to the far right.
David KlionWhat Can We Learn From the 1918 Pandemic?
A recent history of the pandemic illuminates not just parallels with our moment but how a public health crisis can become a political one as well.
Richard J. EvansFrom the Magazine

How Did We End Up With Our Current Public Defender System?
Sara Mayeux’s new history highlights how without a more fundamental transformation of criminal law, public defenders often provide only a limited form of equality and fairness before the law.
Matthew Clair
The Groundbreaking Honesty of Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism
His decades-long project of reportage in graphic form works like oral history—bearing witness to the historical traumas of his subjects.
Jillian Steinhauer
Theodor Adorno and the Crises of Liberalism
At the center of Adorno’s work was a reminder that fascist movements are not exceptional to liberal democracy but signs of its failure.
Peter E. GordonLiterary Criticism

Claudia Rankine’s Dialogue With America
In Just Us, the poet offers a searing assessment of racism and loneliness in today’s America. But while she’s pessimistic about the present, she’s also hopeful about the future.
Elias Rodriques
Grace Paley’s Crowded World
In her life, as in her writing, the boundaries between the personal and the political were remarkably porous.
Maggie Doherty
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 WilsonHistory & Politics

How Did We Get Here?
Three new books by prominent liberal intellectuals—Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Let Them Eat Tweets, Robert B. Reich’s The System, and Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles’s Never Trump—give strikingly different answers.
Nicholas Lemann
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
The Long and Terrifying History of the Blood Libel
A new history by Magda Teter tracks the spread of the pernicious myth and the role new technologies and communication tools played in its dissemination.
David NirenbergPolitics

Orlando Patterson and the Postcolonial Predicament
Out of the ruins of colonialism and empire, the sociologist insisted we could fashion a more egalitarian and liberated future.
Adom GetachewWhen the socialist government of Michael Manley came to power in Jamaica in 1972, the charismatic new prime minister asked the up-and-coming Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson to become his special adviser for social policy and development. Only a decade after the country gained its independence from Britain, Jamaican voters elected… Continue Reading >
Television and Films

John Wilson’s Magically Poignant Urban Histories
His documentary series for HBO is a head-spinning interrogation of the chaos of New York City life.
Vikram Murthi
Michael Apted’s Flawed but Brilliant Epic of British Social Life
The Up series was meant to investigate inequities of British class. It also ended up telling a different story as well.
Susan Pedersen
Out of the Ether
On Mank, Let Them All Talk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Minari, and more films from the end of 2020.
Stuart KlawansHistory

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 ChenOne 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
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May 21, 2019
Mange Meat
Alicia Mountain -
May 21, 2019
Twenty-First Century Woman / Ankle-Length Cardigans / Looking in the Mirror
Amanda Nadelberg -
April 23, 2019
Dear Melissa—
TC Tolbert -
April 23, 2019
Love Prodigal
Traci Brimhall
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A Soundtrack for the American Subconscious
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A ‘Daily Show’ Cocreator on Karens, Crickets, and Comedy After Trump
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The Legend of MF DOOM
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In Memoriam: Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
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Living in the Shadow of Notre Dame
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The Bare Ruined Choirs of Notre Dame
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How Bob Dylan Wrote the Second Great American Songbook
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The Vanishing Queer Underground of Los Angeles
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Roberto Lovato’s Journalism of the Soul
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Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics
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A ‘Daily Show’ Cocreator on Karens, Crickets, and Comedy After Trump
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Silver Lining
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The Coronavirus Means Curtains for Artists
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Dismantling Transphobia at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
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What Does It Mean to Remember AIDS?
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The Frenzied Paris of Virginie Despentes
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The Blinding Clarity of John Le Carré
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Susan Taubes’s ‘Divorcing’ Asks: How Far Can the Novel Take You?
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Out of the Ether
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Modern Hollywood Discovers Its Jazz ‘Soul’
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‘Mank’ Recovers the Radical Roots of ‘Citizen Kane’
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The Groundbreaking Honesty of Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism
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Lightning Strike
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Abstraction at a Distance
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Give the Students a Round of Applause
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You Can Refuse to Work for Fossil Fuel Companies—These Law Students Show How
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Why CUNY Faculty and Staff May Go on Strike
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9 Months Into Touch-Free Living, What Shall We Birth?
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A Lesbian Archive Sends Its Love Letter: Find History, Find Yourself
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How Latin Got Woke
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The Hidden Workers
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Ruling Assange Can’t Be Extradited Is an Indictment of US Prisons
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Sniffing Our Way Back
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Will the Public Internet Survive?
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Máirtín Ó Cadhain: Found in Translation
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Tony Tulathimutte’s Worst-Case Scenarios