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.
Essays
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
Benzion Netanyahu—father of the former prime minister—is not the protagonist; rather, it is his scholarship and the practice of history itself.
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
In both World Wars, France used West African “colonial conscripts.” Deployed on the front lines, they were often the first to be killed.
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
Racial-justice movements in higher education offer a template for how to dislodge education’s focus on entrenching prestige.
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?
When Poetry Summons the Dead
The dead, the disappeared, and the forgotten—these Iberian poems make clear—can never be safely put away.
Prison Tech Comes Home
Landlords’, bosses’ and schools’ intrusion of surveillance technologies into the home extends the carceral state into domestic space.
How Words Lead to Justice
What words politicians say matters. But which words they use is often the result not of individual choices, but of collective action over years.
A Monster in the Shape of a Woman
The same 17th-century society that enabled Johannes Kepler to make his famed astronomical discoveries also accused his own mother of witchcraft.
B-Sides: Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures”
South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.
Harvard–Riverside, Round Trip
In the contemporary United States, higher education does more to exaggerate than relieve class and cultural divisions.
Twelve Moral Axioms on Ryan Murphy’s Oeuvre
“I don’t quite know what Murphy means by baroque or what he means by camp, but Murphy has never been able to discern tone.”
Selling Violence
Some Mexican filmmakers now mirror global stereotypes about Mexico’s violence, which make the films legible for international liberal audiences.
A Beacon of Futurity and a Balm of Security
Guadalupe Maravilla makes multimedia art to grapple with his “traumatic experiences” as a unaccompanied child and undocumented migrant.
How the Campus Becomes the Border
Since all data can now be used for immigration enforcement, universities cannot assume that collecting data on their students is safe.