What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound?
Essays
What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?
As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
How to Build a World
Storytelling like that of Ursula K. Le Guin or Hayao Miyazaki reveals how real-world politics is similarly an act of collective “world building.”
How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
As American as Child Separation
The United States tears families apart—during slavery, in the wars against indigenous people and the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.
Quizzical: Which Academic Press Are You?
We don’t judge books by their covers, but we do sort people based on which academic presses match their personality types.
Plants and Other Science Fictions
Can thinking like a plant save the world?
The Arch of Injustice
St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?
Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change
What should climate-change writing be? What is its ambition as it moves forward?
When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.
Poor Queer Use: Repurposing the Ivory Tower
Outside elite institutions, queer studies has the potential to go hand in hand with broader struggles of racial and economic justice.
Mother of a Pandemic
If there is a way forward for the “pandemic novel,” it may be in Emma Donoghue’s claustrophobic settings of motherhood and childbirth.
The Never-Ending Frontier?
The US imperialist wars in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan grew from US wars against Indigenous people in the 19th century.
Opening the Anthropocene Archives
The Anthropocene has long been discussed in terms of hard science. What do the humanities have to teach about this human age?
On Baltimore: Narratives and City Making
All cities tell a story. But who decides what Baltimore’s next story will be?
B-Sides: Geoff Park’s “Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life”
Environmental wisdom can arise from being a better reader.
Letting Go of Thomas Cromwell
If Hillary Mantel herself can’t bear to part with her well-beloved protagonist, how on earth should the rest of us?
Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
Millions of items looted from Africa during the colonial era remain housed in private collections and museums around the world.
Public Thinker: Katherine McKittrick on Black Methodologies and Other Ways of Being
“How might scientific storytelling, or stories of science, shape the struggle for liberation?”
From Versailles to the War on Terror
The status of the Ottoman Empire and its extraterritorial treaties were left in violent limbo at Versailles. This impacts the world to this day.
