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Arts in Society

Hyman Bloom’s Messy Bodies

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ retrospective of Hyman Bloom, which closes this Sunday, offers visitors the chance to engage with work that exemplifies how art can foster justice-minded, ethical looking.

Alexis L. Boylan

Class & Inequality

The War Against the Poor Knows No Borders

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

Politics, Race

Missing Zinn

On the tenth anniversary of radical historian Howard Zinn’s death, Cornel West opens up about their friendship and what Zinn would have made of the decade—including whether he would have voted for Bernie.

Cornel West, Mordecai Lyon

Politics, Race

The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy

Seeking to discredit those who wish to explain the persistence of racism, critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue—distorting the full case that can be made for it.

David Waldstreicher

Class & Inequality, Race

American Bottom

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

Race

The Radical Lives of Abolitionists

History has tended to sanitize the lives of abolitionists, many of whom were involved in other radical movements as well, including Free Love, which promoted women’s independence and an end to traditional marriage.

Britt Rusert

Race

Black Abolitionists Believed in Taking Up Arms

Long before the Civil War, black abolitionists shared the consensus that violence would be necessary to end slavery. Unlike their white peers, their arguments were about when and how to use political violence, not if.

Randal Maurice Jelks

Philosophy & Religion

The Radical Equality of Lives

Judith Butler talks with Brandon M. Terry about MLK, the grievability of black lives, and how to defend nonviolence today. 

Brandon M. Terry, Judith Butler

Arts in Society

The Historian’s Art

After retiring from Princeton, celebrated historian Nell Irvin Painter decided to go to art school. In this interview with Walter Johnson, she discusses what it’s like to be an old student, and how art lets her tell truths about history that she couldn’t as an academic.

Jonathan M. Square, Walter Johnson, Nell Painter

Gender & Sexuality

Who Is an Ally?

Before allies were included in the LGBT movement, they had never been afforded equal footing within a social justice movement. But is this an effective strategy for building solidarity?

Micki McElya

Politics

Atone—But Not Because It Will Save Democracy

Germany’s official policy of shame about its past is a model the United States should adopt. But it won’t protect either country from far-right extremism.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

Arts in Society

AI’s Human Problem

Two new books about machine creativity mostly reveal how little appreciation we still have for the full range of human creativity.

Alexis L. Boylan

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