“What would a successful war novel look like? This question concealed a deeper question I had: What would a truthful Kashmir novel look like?”
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Let Them Eat Pedagogy
Changing myself and my classroom might help me renew my one-year contract, but it cannot prepare me to demand an alternative.
Queer Leadership, Stronger Universities
It is powerful and affirming to consider the unique qualities that queerness brings to leadership.
Slanting the History of Handwriting
Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident.
What Really Makes Cities Global?
To ask what kind of city Los Angeles is today is, also, to wonder what kind of city it could be tomorrow.
The Protest Is Over—But Its Politics Remain
Ten years later, the Gezi Park protests continue to shape Turkish politics.
B-Sides: Joyce Carol Oates’s “them”
“‘Them’ remakes the naturalist tradition of novels for a society that seems … incapable of ending an addiction to racist violence.”
Protean Environment and Political Possibilities
As the planet warms, environmental destruction obliges us to revise the technoscience expertise and institutions once based on colonial legacies.
Please Hold While I Disconnect You
Both novels and non-fiction suggest exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness are central to digital capitalism.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras on “The Man Who Could Move Clouds”
“I realized that if I was going to write a story about healers, I also had to write a story about healing.”
In Free Fall: Watching “Joyland”
“Joyland” joins a resurgence of Urdu films in recent years whose social realist orientation it both shares and disavows.
Escape from Earth: Raquel Forner’s Space Paintings
If the iconic NASA astronaut is a confident (male) neo-colonist, Forner’s Astronauts are infantile, unprotected, vulnerable.
B-Sides: Neil M. Gunn’s “Highland River”
Freud taught that childhoods shape our adult selves with unresolved trauma. But this novel shows that childhood joy can shape adulthood, too.
The Low-Tech Side of Agri-Food Innovation
Is “low-tech” a more sustainable alternative to moving fast and breaking things? Or just a new iteration of the neoliberal fantasy?
“An Extraordinarily Metal Way to Be”: Authorship and Medieval Women
Maybe we have something to learn from their proclivity for the irreconcilable, unruly, and open-ended.
Raquel Gutiérrez on “Brown Neon: Essays”
“Arts, writing, journalism—these things are born from our passions … this thing that is our weak spot.”
Literature: What to Make of Complicity?
Turkish literature shows how difficult it is to balance political critique with literary experimentation. But it can—and, perhaps, must—succeed.
B-Sides: Georges Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood”
One of the strangest, most devastating works of Holocaust literature is about games.
Symonds’s Facts, Our Future
One Victorian historian realized that if ideas of sexual morality changed across time, then 19th-century Britain could change, too.
The Seduction of Desert Spectacles: Talking “Arid Empire” with Natalie Koch and Andrew Curley
“You cannot divorce domestic empire from international empire. Those histories created one another.”