To work as a translator is to encounter a text with an active desire in mind, a desire that both constitutes and modifies the way that text is experienced.
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The World Latinx Athletes Make
Latinx athletes have forged new identities, cultivated community, and anchored themselves in spaces that were not created for them.
The Netanya-who?s: Gossip and Other Kinds of History
The Melting of the American Mind
Figuring out how people became fascists was the aim of Adorno and his colleagues’ 1950 study, The Authoritarian Personality. Has the answer changed?
Can Anthropology Look to the Future?
Transhumanists want to transcend humanity. Where does that leave anthropology?
How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters out of Men
You Are Never Alone at the Museum
What do we see when looking at art from the perspective of the infrastructures that sustain it?
When Law Attacks the Rule of Law
“Precedent” is one of the key mechanisms for restraining autocratic legalism, as demonstrated by the Trump campaign’s tactics following the 2020 election.
COVID Won’t Change Higher Ed, but Anti-racism Might
Why the Lights Went Out in Puerto Rico
There is nothing like a prolonged blackout to drive home for American observers the unequal distribution of fortune.
Gig Authoritarians
The threat of possible human obsolescence requires not just a different politics but a feat of imagination.
Our Mothers, Ourselves
Both miscarriage and abortion are incredibly common. Yet they are, oddly, still taboo subjects.
Who Segregated America?
Which mortgage banks, nonprofit trade organizations, and insurance companies demonstrably profited from segregating America?
Hopelessly Devoted: Why We Watch Sports
Why do we invest so much energy and emotion in the apparently unimportant and irrational endeavor of sport fandom?
The Once and Future Temp
What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
Black Intellectuals and White Audiences
For more than a century, black intellectuals have been asked to play the role of indigenous interpreters who can explain blackness to white America.
Justice for “Data Janitors”
What is at stake in hiding the delivery people, stockroom workers, content moderators, and call-center operators laboring to produce the automated experience?
On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to reimagine left politics from top to bottom.
Freedom for Whom?
What right does a society have to extoll freedom as its highest virtue if that same society is dependent on the unfreedom of others?