The Latest
Jurors Can Protect Abortion Access
Just as abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act, those resisting the criminalization of reproductive health can employ jury nullification.
How Philosophy Helps Us Find Our Way
Where is the line between professional philosophy and self-help? And how did we end up with this stark divide?
Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn
The recent electoral success of a party with Nazi origins must be understood as part of the long history of white Swedes’ desire for racial homogeneity.
Pleasure Activism
What would it look like if we put our desires at the center of our politics?
Hilary Mantel, Historian
The celebrated novelist treated the past seriously, depicting its psychological complexity and drawing out its present-day political implications.
My grandfather was a virus
I was also spat across an ocean
and clung to the edge of an unwilling continent.
Reconsidering the Good Life
Feminist philosophers Kate Soper and Lynne Segal discuss the unsustainable obsession with economic growth and consider what it might look like if we all worked less.
You Owe Me an Argument
Epiphanies can prompt us to view the world differently, a new book contends. But they are no substitute for ethical and political debate.
What the AIDS Crisis Can Teach Us About Monkeypox
Harm reduction strategies have the best chance of stopping this disease.
Baghdad Baby
“She would sit upright in her bed and recall the moment she saw Aisha’s face.” An Iraqi émigré explains to a New York doctor why she has enrolled in a study for a new antidepressant.
The Banality of Surveillance
The ordinary roots of our extraordinary regime of high-tech monitoring.
How Government Ends
Through an assault on administrative agencies, the Supreme Court is systematically eroding the legal basis of effective governance.
Just Wear Your Smile
The gender politics of Positive Psychology valorize the nuclear family and heterosexual monogamy.
Why Biden’s New Industrial Policy Won’t Work Without Reforms
The passage of the administration’s Inflation Reduction Act should be celebrated, but without explicit corporate guardrails it’s doomed.
Dispatch from Ukraine
As the war continues with no end in sight, the country’s ability to prevail at the front will depend on how badly the war damages life on the ground.
The Ordinary Pleasures of Black Motherhood
Freedom means a world where how I parent is simply mundane rather than overburdened with meaning.
My Revolutionary Inspiration, Barbara Ehrenreich
The late author of Nickel and Dimed played a major role in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.
Two poems by Simone Person
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
Salman Rushdie and the Neoliberal Culture Wars
Far from a metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance, the Rushdie affair exemplifies the marketization of hurt sentiments.