About

“Indispensable.”
—Naomi Klein

“Some of the most penetrating and challenging cultural commentary, political discussion, and social analysis to be found anywhere in the United States.It is a must read.”
—Politics and Prose Bookstore

Boston Review is a web and print magazine of ideas, politics, and culture. Independent and nonprofit, animated by hope and committed to equality, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

We take a special interest in democracy, inequality, and matters of injustice—from war and human rights to poverty and mass incarceration. Our signature feature is the Forum, which subjects bold arguments on the most fundamental issues and pressing challenges of our time to constructive scrutiny and debate.

Our 50-year archive includes work by leading writers, intellectuals, and activists, including Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Robin D. G. Kelley, Vivian Gornick, Martha Nussbaum, Judith Butler, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ellen Willis, Pankaj Mishra, Christopher Hitchens, Arundhati Roy, Sarah Schulman, John Rawls, bell hooks, Cornel West, Elias Khoury, Nancy Fraser, Frances Fox Piven, Staughton Lynd, Manning Marable, Adrienne Rich, Roberto Bolaño, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Sadiq Al-Azm, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, among many others.

Since democracy depends on engaged public discussion, we are committed to keeping our website free and open to everyone, without ads and paywalls. To do so, we rely on generous financial support from our readers. To help sustain a public space for rigorous argument, constructive debate, and vibrant imagination on behalf of a more just world, please become a member or make a tax-deductible donation. Boston Review is published by Boston Critic, Inc., a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

Read more about our history—and what people are saying about us—below. And read a letter from our editors on our 50th anniversary here.

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History

Boston Review began in 1975 as New Boston Review, a quarterly devoted to literature and the arts. Its first editors were Juan Alonso, Jeffrey C. Hart, and Margaret Hill Carter, and the founding staff included Anita Silvey and Jerrold Hickey. In 1977, Gail Pool joined Alonso as co-editor, along with Lorna Condon the following year. Nicholas Bromell became editor in 1980, with publishing support from Arthur J. Rosenthal, and in 1982 the magazine was renamed Boston Review. Subsequent editors were Gail Caldwell, Mark Silk, and Margaret Ann Roth.

An editorial board—including Anthony Appiah, Joshua Cohen, Duncan Kennedy, Kris Rondeau, and Charles Sabel—replaced Roth in 1991. Cohen took over as editor-in-chief in 1993 and developed the magazine’s current focus and mission while maintaining a strong profile in fiction and poetry. Deborah Chasman joined Cohen as co-editor in 2002.

Since 1995 the full text of Boston Review has been available online, always for free. (Digital editions of earlier issues are available to members.) And since 1996 the magazine has also published more than thirty books in the Boston Review books series—accessible primers on pressing issues of the day. A selection of these books is available via MIT Press here and here.

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What People Are Saying

“Brims with that incredible rarity: the sort of writing that can convince people who are not already convinced.”
—Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post nonfiction book critic

“My favorite publication. When it comes to publishing fresh and generative ideas, Boston Review has no peer.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, historian

“Unique and simply indispensable in its dignified refusal to phrase essential critiques in vague or sentimental pieties.”
—Pankaj Mishra, novelist and essayist

“Provocations to thinking in place of thought-terminating clichés: that is what Boston Review does so well.”
—Rick Perlstein, historian

“An essential, invaluable resource.”
—Astra Taylor, writer, activist, and filmmaker

“Among a shrinking few publications that publish material of such seriousness and depth.“
—John Ganz, writer

“We need magazines like Boston Review to see through the self-serving narratives of the powerful and expose the injustice that so many insist on obscuring.”
—Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig

“I read Boston Review religiously.”
—Lisa Duggan, social critic and scholar of gender and sexuality

“What so many journals and magazines on the left claim to be but only partly achieve: literary yet political, demanding yet accessible.”
—David Waldstreicher, historian

“Lucky us we have Boston Review.”
—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian

“A tremendous resource in this time of chaos.”
—Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant Professor at Harvard University

“Plays a critically important role in getting ideas out in the world that can have a real impact in confronting the monumental challenges we face today.”
—Noam Chomsky

“A model of serious left-leaning thinking, featuring the sort of intellectual exchange that holds the promise of making our societies and our world more just.”
—Philippe Van Parijs, political philosopher

“In our swamp of media sensationalism and group-speak, Boston Review stands out as a bold voice for reason and argument, one of the very, very few places that offer intelligence, integrity, and variety.”
—Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher

“One can always count on Boston Review for fresh and exciting commentary on the intellectual currents of our time.”
—Dani Rodrik, economist

“Boston Review has done more than its share to help set the standard for public discourse.”
—Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation

“America is a big country, and Boston Review is one of the two or three best intellectual and political publications we have.”
—Charles Simić, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet 

“Publishing diverse voices that embrace debate and encourage impatience with convention, Boston Review is an indispensable pillar of the public sphere.”
—Alondra Nelson, sociologist

“Boston Review operates at a level of literacy and responsibility which is all too rare in our time.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Good Society

“I love Boston Review for being unfailingly smart, perceptive, and unexpected.”
—Elizabeth Bruenig, staff writer at The Atlantic

“Always challenging, always provocative, Boston Review brings a fresh and insightful perspective to the literature and politics of a multicultural age.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., general editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature

“Boston Review cuts out the noise, the posturing, and the hysteria and engages ideas with intelligence and humanity. In other words, it’s a democratic place for a reading public.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“Boston Review has an almost ferocious commitment to issues—not just debating them, but exploring their root systems. Free-spoken, intelligent, and 180 degrees from the soundbite mentality that governs most writing on controversial subjects.”
—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies 

“Boston Review is hitting it out of the park.”
—Adam Kotsko, cultural critic and translator

“Boston Review is an extremely valuable review.”
—Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature

“Let mainstream publications give in to the perceived demand for bite-sized news; Boston Review provides the exquisite main course.”
—UTNE award citation for Best Writing, 2010

“Boston Review is sustenance for intelligent life on Earth. It is remarkable for the range and quality of its fare, from poetry to philosophy, somehow never losing touch with the practical political concerns that are the spark of its life.”
—Frank I. Michelman, author of Brennan and Democracy 

“Boston Review’s approach to poetry is truly unique and magnificent. . . . I thank you dearly every time I open your pages.”
—Jorie Graham, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“The most stimulating feature, to me, is the collection of responses from thinkers which follows a controversial article. These responses illuminate all facets of an argument and create active thought in the reader. There can be no higher result, in this era of passive consumption.”
—Helen Vendler, literary critic

“Boston Review is one of the few places today where serious discussion of our political alternatives is flourishing. An antidote to complacence and conventional wisdom, it offers hope of revitalizing American political debate.”
—Michael Sandel, author of Democracy’s Discontent 

“Boston Review is a jewel; it contains serious discussion at the highest level of pressing issues in economics, politics, and political philosophy, as well as of art and literature. Don’t miss it!”
—John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice 

“Boston Review is a place where American prose feels exact and alive. It is one of the three or four American journals that makes me feel we have a culture.”
—Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States, 1995–97

“Boston Review is one of a kind. It provides a thoughtful forum for in-depth (but highly readable) debate on new directions.”
—Gar Alperovitz, President of the National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives and author of Atomic Diplomacy

“Boston Review is a feast of the mind, at once intellectually provocative, literary, and unpretentious.”
—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams 

“Boston Review is both lively and serious about ideas, politics, and the arts. It manages to convey the sense that there are things to discuss, and the discussion is actually there.”
—Robert Solow, Nobel Laureate in Economics 

“Boston Review is an outstanding magazine.”
—David Lehman, series editor of The Best American Poetry