This year has been exceptionally busy at Boston Review! In addition to our four print issues, in 2022 we published thirty-eight essays on race, twenty-two philosophy pieces, thirty-four poems, and twenty-four contributions to our class and inequality section—not to mention hundreds more essays across our other sections and special projects.
Given this wealth of great writing, there’s a chance you might have missed some of our excellent essays! Before we launch our countdown of this year’s twenty most-loved pieces, we wanted to highlight ten essays that may have flown under your radar. From a look at the legacy of the War on Terror and a moving recollection of Barbara Ehrenreich to an analysis of populism and a memoir of Black boyhood in Birmingham, here are some of our editors’ favorites.
The lawless—and ongoing—administration of the prison by four American presidents underwrites the broader democratic crisis we face today.
During the Cold War, El Paso public schools knew this too when they taught the children of former Nazis how to be white Americans.
Until COVID-19, tuberculosis killed more people each year than any other infectious disease. Its rising toll is increasingly fueled by mass incarceration.
The commodity’s bloody history is instructive of how global capitalism can and can’t be fixed.
Building public trust requires far more than the conveyance of facts and instruction in scientific thinking.
The late author of Nickel and Dimed played a major role in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.
The passage of the administration’s Inflation Reduction Act should be celebrated, but without explicit corporate guardrails it’s doomed.
Rather than seeking to quash “populism,” we should broaden our vision of politics and make democracies more responsive to citizens.
