Category
Reviews
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The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
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B-Sides: Anthony Veasna So’s “Afterparties”
In “Afterparties,” Anthony Veasna So explores the American dream’s false promise of a profitable, progressive futurity.
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Our Last Supper
“The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild” is a novel that insists on the limits of what fiction can do. Its happy ending, the reader realizes, is no happy ending at all.
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Women on the Verge
Can women poets change the discourses in which they are recognized?
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A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World
Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.
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Excavating New Archives of the Enslaved
Three new books on how Africans shaped the Americas grapple with the politics of archival interpretation in constructing the histories of slavery and empire.
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What If the Body Politic Kept the Score?
Bringing story and social action back into the healing process is the unfinished work of addressing existential suffering.
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Without the Poet, There Is Only War
“The victims of History are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners or memory are also: we live as foreigners, as translators.”
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The Poverty of Homeownership
On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has repeatedly been proven a relentless driver of inequality.
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“Only the Northern Lights”: The Russo-Ukrainian War and Its Poets
These poets unsettle a collective sense of melancholy into a generative force, from which a transformed historical imagination can emerge.
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To Counteract Apocalyptic Technoscience, We Need New Myths
If there is contentment on the artist’s face, it is because she knows that she has left Babylon behind and is on her way to Zion.
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“This Probably Shouldn’t Be a Film … But It Is”
Zia Anger’s “My First Film” is and is not her first film.
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Toward a New Abuelita Canon
The new abuelita canon is giving a sense of interiority to the lived and unlived lives of our abuelas.
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Drawn Together, Held Apart: Cristina Henríquez’s “The Great Divide”
Cristina Henríquez’s novel is the product of extensive historical research. It also comes amid a boom in scholarship on and depictions of Panama and the canal.
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The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime”
The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.
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An Open Letter to Prison Officials on the Censorship of “Tip of the Spear”
Your censorship of my book must be understood within a broader context.
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See Me like a State
As stories about flashy new technologies eclipse more measured coverage, it becomes easy for foreign audiences, particularly those in America, to lose track of the actual harms inflicted by China’s surveillance state.
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Pre-Recession Bliss, or Ignorance: “Laguna Beach” @ 20
There’s a connection between Laguna Beach’s lush close-ups of LC’s face and its recurrent, luxuriating shots of Orange County mansions.
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Beyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy?
Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance?
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How to Botch a Horror-Feminist Sequel in Seven Depressing Steps: “Alien: Romulus”
“Alien: Romulus” is primarily concerned with its aesthetics, not with its ethics. But post-Dobbs, it needed to do more than look good.
