Aging Americans are cared for by family members or low-paid nurses. Both lack support for their necessary work, which COVID-19 has only made harder.
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The “Decameron”; or, How to Laugh through a Pandemic
Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization
“The Culture of Narcissism” @40—and Counting
What if today’s self-centered world was born decades before digital media, as part of a much longer transformation of American society?
Safe at Home in Late Capitalism
Baseball is ideal for explaining American economic precarity: the players try desperately to get home safe, but almost always fail to do so.
Public Picks 2020
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University
The promise of a diverse university and a just world is too precious to give up on.
Mother Courage
The summer I turned 17, in the springboard pause between high school and university, I began working as a nurse aide in the geriatric rest home and hospital run by my mother.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
Emily Dickinson, “The Greatest Freak of Them All”?
Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
What “PEN15” Has Joined Let No Man Tear Asunder
While today’s female-friendship narratives celebrate the central bond, they are mainly about the art of breaking up.
Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
Distant TV
If television is giving you something right now, what might it be telling you about what you need?
B-Sides: Louis Bromfield’s “Pleasant Valley”
“What I wanted was a piece of land which I could love passionately, which I could spend the rest of my life in cultivating.”
The Enduring City: Jakarta, Indonesia
In the parts of the city left behind is a Jakarta free from the globalized sameness of so many of the world’s megacities.
Black Poetry after Beyoncé
How do black feminist artists negotiate their own work in the wake of commercial success beyond contemporary poetry’s wildest dreams?
What Can Big Data Teach Us about Eviction?
Big data shows that those fighting eviction today need not be constrained by today’s ideas or laws of property.
