What was happening in the streets of Iran—what one white feminist couldn’t see—was a revolution, looking for different freedoms than the West.
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Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
Karen Carpenter’s Afterlives
Everyone knows that feeling when a song—written by someone else in some other place or time—sees you so completely in the present. But how does that happen?
Public Thinker: Marcia Chatelain on Feminism, Fast Food, and First Gens
Can Tech Ever Be Good?
Companies like Uber and Airbnb rely on the exploitation of users and workers—and some investors are pushing back. Welcome to the “techlash.”
Paris Doesn’t Always Have To Be Burning
The documentary "Paris Is Burning" obscured the ordinary lives of queer people of color, but new footage reveals how the film could have been different.
What Would a Feminist City Look Like? Talking with Leslie Kern
B-Sides: Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters”
A child’s novel can be funny by revealing how much a child does know, after all.
Ferrante Breaks the Frame
A defaced family photograph—with an ancestor cut out—reveals to Ferrante’s new protagonist how women are erased by the words and deeds of men.
For the Slow Work of Critique in Critical Times
With so many crises—environmental, humanitarian, racial, viral, and economic—the work of “critique” can seem to be a luxury. But is it?
The Once and Future Temp
What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could our internet have been?
Francisco Cantú Talks Borders, Rhetoric, and Climate Change
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
The late literary scholar hoped the writings of older feminists in the academy would help younger women “name their anger and find companionship in enduring it.”
“To Examine Society and Try to Change It”
A Columbia University course serving formerly incarcerated men and women is grounded in an understanding of the powerful meliorative effects of education.
Joni Mitchell’s Ferocious Gift
Joni Mitchell’s brilliant art was always a product of artifice as much as it was of honesty.
The Great LOLCat Massacre
What makes cats so useful as an alphabet for the literature of the web?
Free Is and Free Ain’t
Freedom has always been arbitrary in a world, then and now, when the practice of capitalism requires the ongoing erosion of even the most basic rights.
Pornography Porn
The explosion of porn signals the widespread uptake of questions of objectification, the politics of looking, and the relation between power and enjoyment.
Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them.
