Archive
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Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
“The literary ecosystem is for every reader of every age. It is for every writer of every style.”
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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Can the River Debate the Suburb?
Firms like Philip Morris hold rights that exceed those of most humans. Estates speak for the dead. Trusts speak for the unborn. Legally, we can devise new ways for nature to be legally represented within our human world.
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American Metamorphoses
“That rivers and wild rice can now become legal persons discloses the precarity of previously entrenched definitions of nature, personhood, property, and law: that is, the terms that constitute a world.”
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Pied Noir Homesick Blues
Camus opens the book with Meursault’s life, but François Ozon opens the new film adaptation with Meursault’s specific moment in history: the brutal French colonization of Algeria.
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Retro Gaming: It’s Not Nostalgia, It’s Resistance
“If we want to resist the enshittified paradigms around us, we can’t just shake a fist at the sky: We have to show them a better way.”
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The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life
Avi Shlaim, historian and influential scholar of Israel’s relationship with the Arab world, joins John Plotz and Yuval Evri to discuss class, caste differences, and destructive ethno-nationalist ideologies in mainstream Israeli politics.
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The Life of the Mind of a Factory Worker
“Beware to those who read ‘Adrift in the South’ solely as a cautionary tale about the Chinese state without considering the international flows of goods and power.”
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Long-Distance Talkers: The Great Depression Speaks
During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration conducted thousands of interviews among American workers. Anne Trubek’s “American Made” gives them new voice.
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If We Rot, You Rot with Us
“Despite the enduring belief that literary nonsense is primarily directed toward children—an idea that has its roots in the popularity of Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss—literary nonsense has historically been weaponized by the masses, always under the guise of stupidity, to effect change.”
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The Last Graduate Students?
“I began writing this as a record of what it felt like to be a student then, as collective attachments to values—long recognized as fraying, with the knell of the next scapegoat, or horrifying spectacle—face the final chopping block: public good, responsibility to others, democracy itself.”
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The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
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“The Poetics of Social Forms”: Remembering Fredric Jameson (1934–2024)
“No other thinker, Hegelian Marxist or otherwise, has lived up to this modernist vocation with the originality, intellectual élan, aesthetic intelligence, and political trenchancy of Fredric Jameson.”
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The Uninhabitable Front
“Israeli military aircraft flew low over the Lebanese villages of Ras Naqoura and Aita al-Shaab, spraying agricultural fields with a fine mist… Within days, the green of fields, orchards, and olive groves turned brown. Farmers who had worked the same soil for generations watched their trees die.”
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“Being Undocumented Is Already a Chronic Stress. Then, Add in Blackness”: Talking with Dr. Felecia Russell on the Experience of Black Undocumented Folks
“Growing up, I really didn’t get exposed to the conversations about immigration, until I found out that I didn’t have the proper documentation. Once I learned that, my world, I felt, just really shattered.”
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Remember Them: Palestine Scholars Murdered in the Gaza Genocide
“In Palestine, some 87,000 students have suffered a near total disruption of their studies for the duration of the genocide, and more than 1200 have been killed. Upwards of 200 academic staff have perished, many in targeted attacks.”
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Rachel Cusk’s Diminishing Returns
“Cusk remains one of the most formally restless novelists of our time. The trouble is that this inventiveness may now be outpacing Cusk’s thinking.”
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Manufacturing Goodness: What Administrators Really Do and Why
“When trying to rectify or at least understand the administrative, and thus, the university, problem, it is the logic of goodness—and in particular the manufacturing of goodness—that is most necessary to expose.”
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If on a Winter’s Night a Reader…
We read to find ourselves. But what if, instead, we end up finding ourselves only in books? What if we can’t distinguish our life from those we read about? What if we stop trying to?
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The Saddest Cattle in the World: Atahualpa Yupanqui, Empire, and the Sound of Stolen Land
“He only needed that couplet. Two lines that conjure the story of an entire social order.”
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