The Latest
The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough
MAGA’s base is more fractured than it looks.
What Are We Living Through?
Three competing narratives of the second Trump administration.
Plato and the Poets
The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one.
Building a Political Home
Activist and scholar Cathy J. Cohen on winning power in the midst of a “generational war.”
The Inventor of the Future
The autobiography of anticolonial luminary Andrée Blouin captures her era’s euphoric highs as well as its tragic denouement.
The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public
Trump’s actions are illegal, yes. Worse than that, they are wrong—precisely what the legality debate is meant to obscure.
A Theory of the List
From runaway slave lists to Canary Mission, the state has long deputized citizens to enforce its will.
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Celebrating 50 years of Boston Review
“
This extraordinary intervention is politically potent in all the best ways, but most invaluably it recalls America to itself, reminding the nation of three searingly inconvenient, interrelated truths: that it holds colonies with cruel impunity; that despite all our democratic mythopoeia we are an empire; and that the ideologies that bind us to these twin tines of the devil’s pitchfork are inescapably apocalyptic.
—Junot Díaz on “An Open Letter from Guam to America” (2017)
Forums
Israel and Palestine
“The way we lived with each other before involved exactly the ‘social shame and cultural pressure’ that Klein and other influential voices now come to condemn.”
—Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “How Can We Live Together?”
“Blouin’s very birth troubled a colonial order erected on a strict racial hierarchy. She would make sure that her life would be far more of a problem for it.”
—Sandipto Dasgupta, “The Inventor of the Future”
“By cloaking naked power in the trappings of the law, the Trump administration channels objections to its behavior into sterile disputes about who has the best lawyers.”
—Joe Margulies, “The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public”
“What counts as ‘violence,’ and what counts as ‘order,’ are always political determinations made by those in power.”
—Eric Reinhart, “What Is Political Violence?”
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