The Latest

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. 

Law

Immigrants Welcome*

Trump’s Muslim ban was not just an aberration. U.S. citizenship has long been predicated on whiteness as it was understood in 1790.

Race

The Cost of Canonizing MLK

In these video interviews, Brandon M. Terry explains how MLK’s canonization has come at the expense of taking him seriously as a political thinker.

Politics Race

A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

Self-defense is not merely an individual right; it is collective political resistance.

Arts in Society

Public Intimacies

A posthumous collection of Joanne Kyger’s writing has the feel of a scrapbook with the weight of literary history.

From the Editors: Fifty Years Since MLK

Arts in Society

The Reformatory

Stories are dangerous. They can get you killed.

Class & Inequality

Globalization Survived Populism Once Before—and It Can Again

Forget retraining and compensation programs. History offers a better way forward. 

Arts in Society

Two Poems

Count
with me: first your skin, then
this tendon, that other bubblegum.

Law

Exceptional Victims

The resistance to the Vietnam War was the most diverse and dynamic antiwar movement in U.S. history. We have all but forgotten it today.

Arts in Society

Two Poems

An avalanche of alpine
flowers ( // ) spills into
a novel by Murakami
or Saknussemm

Law

Who Gets the Right to Stay?

The moral right of states to apprehend and deport irregular migrants erodes with the passage of time.

Arts in Society

Dulltopia

On the dystopian impulses of slow cinema.

Gender & Sexuality

Toward a Trans* Feminism

Feminism and trans* activism have been at odds for decades. They don’t need to be.

Arts in Society

Elegy for Threatened Words

It wasn’t that the cake was vulnerable
to teeth so much as meant for eating—a mouth’s entitlement,
or, in indulgence’s own belly, a Lego project of cells, a fetus.

Arts in Society

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.

Politics

The Burden of Being Good

That the United States wields its power benevolently is anything but clear from a Russian vantage point.

Law Politics

The Man from Kasimpasa

Erdogan is all too easily labelled a populist. But the reasons for his popularity are more complicated.

Arts in Society

Border Lyrics

In daring new translations of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters and Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea, linguistic playfulness and political acuity overlap in breathtaking ways.

Arts in Society

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Arts in Society

A Strategy for Ruination

An interview with China Miéville

Class & Inequality

The Gig Economy’s Great Delusion

Platforms have sold themselves as substitutes for welfare, but they have actually served as substitutes for traditional work—with the state forced to pick up the slack.

Arts in Society

Erosion Infrastructure

I took in a tired traveler.
What holding my bedframe.
Up off of the tired floor.
What set of cinder blocks grating.

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