The Latest

Arts in Society

Where Islands End and Begin

Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [lukao] is a personal document of witness, shelter, history, and hope.

Race

Brother Martin Was a Blues Man

Cornel West on Martin Luther King, Jr., hope, and the future of activism, in conversation with Brandon M. Terry, Elizabeth Hinton, and Tommie Shelby.

Science

Headset Hypocrisy

By the 2020 election, the market for virtual reality is projected to increase twentyfold. That's great news for VR's proponents who relish the technology's persuasive powers, but what does it mean for those inside the headset? 

Arts in Society

In Memoriam: Lucie Brock-Broido

Of the many words that might describe Lucie Brock-Broido, the most appropriate is extraordinary.

Law

On the Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons

What differentiates the crimes of a terrorist, hacker, or non-state actor from those of a president who launches a nuclear weapon?

Arts in Society

Metamorphoses

what was it this
morning : you said

redgrass glistens
in surf : the pine

Arts in Society

A Postcard from Ursula

A science fiction writer remembers his early correspondences with Ursula Le Guin.

Arts in Society Science

Introducing “What Nature”

The poems collected in What Nature were written in the predawn of the Sixth Extinction Event.

Arts in Society

Casserole Brigades and Corporate America

With Proprietary, Randall Mann comes into his own as a poet of wit and cynicism.

Arts in Society

From Khaki Diamond

Translated from the Portuguese by Ana Paula

Politics

The Disillusionment of Post-Soviet Europe

To understand why Europe seems more balkanized now than ever, we must look to Eastern Europe’s failed reconstruction.

Class & Inequality

Mark Lilla and the Crisis of Liberalism

The critique of identity politics ignores the role that neoliberalism and neoconservatism have played in creating our present situation.

Arts in Society

Glowing with Absence and Merchandise

Harmony Holiday's new book, Hollywood Forever, is a warehouse of quotidian pleasures and horrors.

Class & Inequality Philosophy Race

The Almost Inevitable Failure of Justice

The persistence of black poverty has become a permanent feature of U.S. democracy. We need an expanded political imagination to dismantle it.

Arts in Society

Two Poems

Read the headlines aloud to your partner in
bed when your love life is losing momentum.

Arts in Society Race

Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve

The movie, unique for its Black star power, depends on a shocking devaluation of Black American men.

Arts in Society

Callimachus in Jelly Shoes

Burt’s latest collection reveals a poet looking back to formative moments in the 1980s when poetry first began to offer succor, and a playlist, for the fact of our weightful existence.

Arts in Society

Three Poems

“To survive” means to be

alive despite what nearly

took you or did the dead.

My faceful of arrowheads

pointing at—

Class & Inequality Politics

Cities on a Hill?

Cities are increasingly being viewed as bastions of progressivism. But can they live up to the promise?

Politics

Austerity by Design

Yanis Varoufakis’s lessons for reasserting European social democracy. 

Arts in Society

Undoing a Long Erasure

A new collected works of Marianne Moore restores many poems to better versions lost in subsequent editions.

Arts in Society

Curiosity (X)

The first joke goes: suppose I told you how
often I draw bangs on women that I haven’t
met and who don’t wear bangs?

Race

Against National Security Citizenship

Support for the U.S. military has long been seen as a crucial way for black Americans and immigrants to show that they “belong.”

Philosophy

Will Robots Set Us Free?

The philosopher Herbert Marcuse saw machines as our greatest hope for real liberty. But in Trump’s America, automation feels more totalitarian than ever. 

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