Criticism
The Machines Get in the Way
The work of art—and the work of making art—in an age increasingly hostile to it.
Rise Up
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set in a familiar realm of forever wars fought at the behest of cruel elites. Like all great fantasy, it shows us what might be otherwise.
The Ghost of Gabriel García Márquez
On the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s posthumously published novel, Until August.
Neither Governed nor Free
Even the singularity’s biggest boosters mostly concede that AI can’t create real works of art.
Can We Still Write about Trauma?
Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, makes the case that we can—by moving away from representations of individual suffering.
Octavia Butler’s Blasphemous Solidarities
The novel Kindred reminds us, emphatically, gruesomely, that white supremacy is us too.
What Is “the Jews”?
Daniel Boyarin makes the seemingly paradoxical proposal that in order to end Zionism, Jewishness should be defined as nationhood.
A Century of the Frankfurt School
The Institute for Social Research was founded one hundred years ago. We ignore its prescient theorists at our peril.
A Century of Serious Difficulty
Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism a hundred years on.
Archive Fever
László Krasznahorkai’s Spadework for a Palace reflects on the power of the surveillance state through the perspective of a librarian who wishes to lock up all books.
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