“Declared Intention”: My Immigration Story, and Ours “Declared Intention”: My Immigration Story, and Ours
Like many Americans, I may only be one generation away from birthright citizenship—a concept that defined this country’s promise for so many immigrants.
Jul 30, 2025 / Robert Pinsky
Essex Hemphill’s Poetry of Belonging Essex Hemphill’s Poetry of Belonging
He was an artist and activist who found in his verse a tool for both community and agitprop.
Jul 30, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Felsenthal
Is Pitching a Novel All That Different From “Shark Tank”? Is Pitching a Novel All That Different From “Shark Tank”?
Alex Higley’s True Failure, which dramatizes one man’s dream to pitch his business idea on reality TV, slyly compares this bathetic task to publishing literary fiction.
Jul 29, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Ben Sandman
It Has Never Been Easy to Be Both Black and American It Has Never Been Easy to Be Both Black and American
The administration knows that subduing history as it is doing works to keep people of color in this country disunited and at odds with each other.
Jul 28, 2025 / Keenan Norris
Before Sebald Was Great Before Sebald Was Great
By looking at his early work, we can better understand who the German writer was beyond his persona as the melancholy intellectual and serious man of letters.
Jul 28, 2025 / Books & the Arts / David Schurman Wallace
The New Deal and the Popular Front Gave Us Superman The New Deal and the Popular Front Gave Us Superman
The real Man of Steel wasn’t woke, but he was radical.
Jul 25, 2025 / Jeet Heer
Challenging the Silence Over Palestine in the American Historical Association Challenging the Silence Over Palestine in the American Historical Association
Institutional complicity in injustice.
Jul 24, 2025 / Van Gosse
The Argentine Grandmothers Who Resisted the Junta The Argentine Grandmothers Who Resisted the Junta
Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood looks at the efforts of a human rights group to find the children and grandchildren who were disappeared by a dictatorship.
Jul 24, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Jacob Sugarman
Want to Understand Global Inequality? Visit the Dump. Want to Understand Global Inequality? Visit the Dump.
Alexander Clapp’s Waste Wars, a world-spanning inquiry into the politics of garbage, makes a case that everything that is wrong with capitalism is embodied in our trash.
Jul 23, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Carol Schaeffer
The Enduring Lessons of Wages for Housework The Enduring Lessons of Wages for Housework
Emily Callaci’s history of the international feminist movement examines the influence of their intellectual and political victories.
Jul 22, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Maia Silber