The Latest
The Conditions Are Always Impossible
Lily Blacksell talks to Luke Kennard about poetry, fiction, and the writing process.
Statue Mania
Focusing only on Confederate monuments misses that racism is memorialized everywhere.
What Does Police Abolition Mean?
Abolition is not about transforming the police; it is about transforming the nation.
Three Poems
Around your androgynous countenance glances
descend like debris. Everyone struggles through
figuring out their bodies. Standing there, you
resemble an “I”—you’re capital—learning that
Tweeting @ Thoreau
Walden is often championed as an anti-technology manifesto. But this misses the value Thoreau found in conversations spread across vast spans of time and distance.
Who Cares What the Future Brings
Mónica de la Torre’s new book, The Happy End / All Welcome, is expansive, inventive, and often hilarious.
Kenya’s New Electoral Authoritarianism
Elections are now used to legitimate authoritarian regimes, not herald liberal democracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kenya.
The Man Who Invented Information Theory
Of the pioneers who drove the information technology revolution, Claude Shannon may have been the most brilliant.
Frederick Douglass Is Dead
& might very well remain that way,
despite the best attempts
of our present overlord to resurrect
The Book that Explains Charlottesville
The University of Virginia has long been a bastion of white supremacy and white supremacy–validating scholarship.
How to Avoid War with North Korea
As Trump tweets us closer to war, a look back at North Korean nationalism may provide an out.
Kochonomics: The Racist Roots of Public Choice Theory
A controversial new book traces how the anti-democratic projects of the Jim Crow South evolved into an economic theory still championed by the GOP today.
Frank Bidart’s Mirror
The collected poems of Frank Bidart provide an incisive index of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Triptych
But for is always game.
A man can be murdered
twice, but for science,
his body a pool of blood
Militarizing the Presidency
In an era of military solutionism, can citizens still exercise control over American military force?
Synchronized Swim
Ophélia watches the girl
spin down through the blue depths,
burrowing in until we see
just the tips of her toes
Unreliable Witnesses
From scrapbooks to family albums, a new book presents their visual testimonies from Kashmir.
What the Minimum Wage Debate Gets Wrong
Critics of raising the minimum wage claim that it decreases employment, but they are missing the larger point.
Two Poems
Let’s go on a date! Let’s make a joke
of the MEAL PART, wadding our napkins
into strangled swans, and ordering only
shoestring fries with malt vinegar,
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