Books and Ideas

Magnus Hirschfeld, 1899.

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Forgotten Revolution Magnus Hirschfeld’s Forgotten Revolution

The Weimar physician advocated for a more fluid understanding of sexuality and gender—a pioneering idea that was erased by the rise of Nazism.

Aug 5, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Lizzie Tribone

Swimmers in the Rio Grande River, 2007.

The Story of America Can Be Found on the Banks of the Rio Grande The Story of America Can Be Found on the Banks of the Rio Grande

Richard Parker’s love letter to El Paso, The Crossing, argues that the Texas city can illustrate the best and the worst of the nation’s history.

Aug 4, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Kyle Paoletta

A man in a collared shirt and tie rides a motorcycle in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“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, 1991.

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

An episode of “Shark Tank,” 2015.

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

A community member holds a candle by the “Say Their Names” art installation cemetery with headstones representing Black people killed by police, during a vigil marking the fifth anniversary of George Floyd's death, at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2025.

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

W.G. Sebald, 1999.

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

A four-panel comic from Action Comics 8, 1939. Superman destroys slum housing to force the government to build public housing for the poor.

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

Gazan children playing in the rubble of the Islamic Univerity

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

Matilde “Sacha” Artes, of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, 1985.

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

x