The Latest
Bond Villains
How a little-understood feature of urban finance—municipal bonds—fuels racial inequality.
Can We Still Write about Trauma?
Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, makes the case that we can—by moving away from representations of individual suffering.
Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?
Within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness.
Neville Alexander’s Struggle Against Racial Capitalism
The late South African intellectual and activist—imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela—fought for a world without race and class.
Transcolonial Poem, or while contemplating double mastectomy I remember Columbus believed the world was shaped like a boob
they’re building roads and military bases, churches and missionary / encampments and call centers and textile factories they’re digging and / fracking and separating metal from the earth
Who’s Afraid of Social Contagion?
Our ideas about sexuality and gender have changed before, and now they’re changing again.
Bartow Station
It’s a thing about being a man. To be so stingy, to deny even a sip of yourself. To deny and deny and deny until one day it all comes out as a violence, like water spewing forth from a hose.
A Record of Violence
Jeanne Theoharis speaks with Margaret Burnham on her work reconstructing Jim Crow terror, within and outside the law.
What I couldn’t have done without Boston Review
Boston Review’s Black Voices in the Public Sphere fellowship program handed me a bounty few early-career writers ever receive.
Rock Creek Parkway
When you weren’t sure if a guy was gay, you asked if he was Canadian. The straight ones always look puzzled, and told you they were American.
Wounded Knee’s Radical Legacy
Fifty years ago, the American Indian Movement occupied the site of a historic massacre. They won real gains in the face of brutal counterinsurgency tactics.
Can Innovation Serve the Public Good?
Not as it’s traditionally done, but there are more equitable models.
The Localist
Why did Chicago become the headquarters of free market fundamentalism? Adam Smith offers a clue.
Uncensored Footage of the Cyborg at the U.S. Embassy
a presenter / interrupts a program to break the news of migrants / found dead on the shores of river niger. i look down / the streets through my window.
The Intimate Project of Solidarity
A conversation with Dan Berger and veteran activists Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons on the origins of Black Power and the work of coalition building.
Octavia Butler’s Blasphemous Solidarities
The novel Kindred reminds us, emphatically, gruesomely, that white supremacy is us too.
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