It was a December 17, 2012, review in the New Republic that called it. In the course of largely panning Roberto Bolaño’s Woes of the True Policeman as an ...
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B-Sides: Chaucer’s “The House of Fame”
For years, and with particular intensity since the 2015 Dylann Roof shooting and 2016 election, we have debated the fate of not only Confederate monuments but ...
“Hamilton”: Who Tells Your Story?
Hamilton: An American Musical, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, achieved an unusual degree of cultural cachet almost immediately upon its 2015 Broadway ...
“Caste, Class, and Race” @ 70
As we pass the 70th anniversary of Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, his message ...
Masculinity on the Mat
From Ready Player One to Roseanne, popular culture in 2018 might be looked back on as “problematic,” to use a polite academic term, in its attempts to bottle and sell 1980s nostalgia. Conservative in both form and content ...
Keyword of the Week: Animals
What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences ...
Animal Feelings
We read stories of how, after losing their companions, dogs and bunnies refuse to eat; ducks and horses exhibit nervousness and social anxiety; dolphins strand themselves ...
On the Origin of Extinction
Extinction has never been a purely scientific concept. When theories of extinction exploded onto the Western intellectual scene in the early 19th ...
The Vegan Resistance
In 2011, Oprah Winfrey asked her staff at Harpo Studios to take a vegan challenge: eat no meat, fish, eggs, dairy, or any other animal products for seven days. The episode, which has since enjoyed a ...