Category
Reviews
-
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.”
-
Once upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan
Two novels published in 2024 return to some of the best-known, canonical figures and episodes from Mexico’s past.
-
J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable
What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?
-
“No Future” Lexicon: Geronticide
Reexamining geronticide helps to sharpen our focus on what is at stake in debates about medically assisted dying, ageism, and disability.
-
“No Future” Lexicon: Erasure
The erasure of disabled futures intersects with other forms of eradication and suppression of diverse futures.
-
Forever Wars, Forever Forgotten
As the war on terror expanded abroad, paradoxically, it faded further into the American background.
-
Queer Joy Is Earned—and Requires Earnest Care
To view “I Kissed a Girl” as predominantly upbeat is to miss why it’s representation of bad feelings is important.
-
The Origin of Love and Nightmares
Hong Kong has become an apt prism through which to probe the skin tissue between state violence and victimization, and the widening wounds to personal freedom.
-
“Can the Dead Save the Living?”: Reading Han Kang During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis
Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?
-
The Scenery of the Crime
Opera demands a generous sense of the preposterous. So too does the mystery novel.
-
2 Angry Men: On Eastwood, Trump, and the Law
In attacking law without attacking the real abuses of the criminal justice system, Juror #2 is a groundless assault on the only institution that can save us from all-out authoritarian rule.
-
Lone Star Futures
Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has unfortunately also been a place where those liberties find some of their ends.
-
It’s Not Optimal
Four books about a new age of AI tell stories of sluggish processes, ambiguous outcomes, emotionally charged issues, and generous margins for error.
-
After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction?
Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.
-
“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism
“Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.
-
-
B-Sides: Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”
Lorelei accelerates the world around her. It is foolish to try to settle accounts while in her orbit. This is a problem for not only bookkeeping but also psychoanalysis.
-
Who Feeds London?
What really is a capacious and dynamic food culture? Where is such a culture to be found? And, if such a culture exists, who are its enemies?
-
Time Well Spent: Beyond Success and Failure in Romancelandia and Academia
What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?
-
Chekhov’s Pandemic?
Even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to “Tom Lake” and “Our Country Friends,” these novels are irradiated by the theater.
-
The Future of Tech: Black Boxes or Clear Communication?
To optimize what’s happening in the world of digital technology, we’ve got to understand the unspoken rules of that world.
