A Political and Literary Forum
Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ continues a long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American whiteness. It’s the same nostalgia Trump has mobilized on the far right.
Ellen Wayland-Smith
Everyone agrees that child poverty is a problem. Why are Democrats and Republicans so bad at addressing it?
Rajan Menon
Monarch butterflies may be gone in thirty years. Saving them seems apolitical, but environmentalists have landed in the sights of drug cartels, illegal loggers, Trump supporters, and even clandestine avocado farmers.
Rob Nixon
Policing is not the only kind of state violence. In the mid-twentieth century, city governments, backed by federal money, demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.
Brent Cebul
As we know from South Africa's crisis, political and social fault lines will shape the contours of joblessness.
Nicholas Rush Smith
Boston Review talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton about COVID-19, the relationship between culture, financial hardship, and health, and why capitalism’s flaws are proving fatal for America’s working class.
Joshua Cohen, Angus Deaton
Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis. This is the result of racist policies which collapsed the social safety net while setting blacks in the path of danger.
Colin Gordon, Walter Johnson, Jason Q. Purnell, Jamala Rogers
Conservatives have long been sounding the alarm about “undeserving” people receiving public assistance. These fears have deep ties to racism and the policing of black women’s bodies.
Scott W. Stern
Despite President Bolsonaro's COVID-19 denialism, a small Brazilian city has one of the most ambitious responses in the world.
Paul R. Katz, Leandro Ferreira
While the government and some banks have announced mortgage moratoriums, they have not insisted that rent relief be passed on to tenants. Many renters don’t know what they will do come April 1, let alone May 1.
Mordecai Lyon
The Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran and cuts to SNAP benefits are two sides of the same war that the rich are waging against the global poor.
Liz Theoharis
Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
Walter Johnson
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Jacob Whiton
William Callison, Quinn Slobodian
Charisse Burden-Stelly
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Colleen Murphy
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