Reading Lists

Our weekly Reading Lists compile editors’ selections from Boston Review’s decades-long archive that speak to the pressing political, cultural, and intellectual debates of our time.

Sign up for our email newsletter to have them delivered straight to your inbox. A selection appear online, below.

How We Think About Science and Conspiraces

A reading list.

How Not to Fix Our Housing Crisis

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the perils of Black homeownership, and other essays from our archive in today’s reading list.

20 Years of the War on Terror

“9/11 unleashed a particularly virulent strain of the impulse to believe that some among us are less than human.”

Haiti and Afghanistan

How U.S. intervention devastated both.

Coltrane. Monk. Aretha.

A Black music reading list.

Flying Saucers

A reading list on stars, space, and more.

Abolition Isn’t Only About Police

We also need to abolish prisons—as well as put an end to counterterrorism. An abolitionist reading list. 

Philosophies of Sports Fandom

A slam dunk reading list on all things sports.

Food for Thought

Our best essays on food and eating from the past forty-six years! From a food anthropologist’s early love affair with Chinese cuisine to the farmers’ protests in India, the pieces in this list consider food from political, cultural, and economic perspectives.

Archival Essays for Juneteenth

“It is a commonplace to say that slavery ‘dehumanized’ enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting.”

Toward Trans Liberation

“Queerness is not a vertical identity. It hopscotches across communities, blessing only some of us.”

The BR Summer Book Guide

Your beach reads sorted. Fourteen books we loved—and one to avoid at all costs.

Our Favorite Interviews

Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Susan Sontag, and more.

Israel’s War on Palestine

The current crisis reflects decades of brutal Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.

Pandemic Moms. Trans Moms. Marxist Moms. Robot Moms.

—and those who wish they could be mothers. Our annual Mother’s Day reading list.

Why Democracy Needs…

Privacy. Women. Archives. No Cops. Practice. Losers. And more in today’s reading list.

Poetry Collection: Award-Winning Poets

The fourth in our series of reading lists to celebrate National Poetry Month.

COVID and the Climate Crisis Can’t Be Separated

—and nor can our health and the health of animals. An earth day reading list.

Poetry Collection: Uplifting Women’s Voices

The third in our series of reading lists to celebrate National Poetry Month.

75 Years Without Keynes

We put the renowned economist front and center in today’s reading list.

Who Deserves Forgiveness?

Biden. Student Loans. Incarcerated People. And more in today’s reading list.

Poetry Collection: Empathy

The second in our series of reading lists to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Women Philosophers: A Reading List

We celebrate International Women’s Day.

What Is It like to Be an Octopus?

A reading list on all things mind, brain, and consciousness.

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