The Latest
UFOs and the Boundaries of Science
This summer, an intelligence report and a new Harvard research project have renewed the public’s interest in UFOs. But neither is likely to change many minds.
Here Come the Robot Nurses
The pandemic increased demand and possibilities for automating care, but doing so may deliver racist stereotypes and unemployment for women of color.
At the Gates, Mikhail Makes Me a Feast of Rain and Dirt
Hazem Fahmy was a finalist for the 2019 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest and this poem appeared in our arts anthology Allies.
Workplace Training in the Age of AI
To support the work of the future, we must promote workers’ skills as crucial to technological progress.
Centuries From Now I’ll Be the Archaeologist Who Digs Up Ferdinand Marcos’s Bones
What Are “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”?
A recent government report gave UFOs a rebrand, but so many basic questions remain unanswered.
We Don’t Know, But Let’s Try It
For economist Albert O. Hirschman, social planning meant creative experimentation rather than theoretical certainty.
Stop Building Bad AI
Justice demands that we think not just about profit or performance, but above all about purpose.
Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists
We’re witnessing the last-ditch effort of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis.
sometimes i want to give God all the glory, but then i remember that he’s a white man too
mom calls me often
to ask if i’ve been doing
my nightly devotionals
Dog Tiger Horse
“I could have been a clever girl. When the first of the Japanese bombs fell on Penang, my father stopped us from going to school. And when the war was over, there was no question of going back. So I married your father.” Three generations of a family struggle to maintain their way of life in a country changed irrevocably by war.
Lost in Space
Billionaires such as Musk, Bezos, and Branson peddle the idea that space represents a public hope, all the while reaping big private profits.
Beyond Choice
Elegies for Empire
We can find reconciliation and closure in poetry, despite the forces that engender grief and dispossession. Three new poetry collections refuse the binaries and amnesia that so often characterize American mourning.
The Sounds of Struggle
The pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., that fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation.
How It Was
“Aunt Steph got ugly after Gammy died, although people were often ugly to her first.” In this short story, a woman reflects on a series of charmed summers before loss descended.
China and the Lure of Global Capitalism
The country’s explosive development has relied on markets—at the cost of earlier ideals.
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