Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects ...
Essays
Resisting the Rhetoric of Disaster
Ever since the Arab world achieved political independence, its great hopes for self-determination and freedom have been built up and razed down several times ...
Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician ...
How Liberal Americans Sustain Israel’s Occupation
Why has the United States historically supported Israel? And should the ...
John Kennedy Toole @50
Thelma Toole, the mother of the novelist John Kennedy Toole—author of the extraordinary almost-unpublished novel A Confederacy of Dunces—delivered one of the most irresponsible accusations in ...
The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers ...
In Memoriam: Agnes Heller
Agnes Heller, the Hungarian-born political philosopher, died recently, at the age of 90. The obituaries in outlets like the New York Times, Le Monde, and Deutsche Welle have been respectful, and even ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
Who Cares about Literary Prizes?
Earlier this morning, the Booker Prize judges announced their shortlist for 2019, stamping just six novels—out of the ...
Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver ...
In the Moment, On the Edge
What was literary impressionism? It is not an easy question to answer, since literary impressionism was less a movement than a sensibility. The impressionist writer ...
Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home ...
Machines Like Me, But They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve ...
QUIZZICAL: Can You Match the Lock of Hair with Its Author?
Both the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the ...
Translation’s Burden
A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have ...
Acts of Mothering
Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential ...
How Does Copyright Matter?
Copyright as we know it is a surprisingly recent development. It has been with us just a few decades—only as long, roughly, as Hello Kitty and the Star Wars ...
Inside the Map: On Two Novels by Pola Oloixarac
One of Jorge Luis Borges’s most enduring fictions is the one-paragraph story “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”). Structured as a fragment of ...
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds ...
Summer Reads: Pan-African Literature
To celebrate Africa Day, May 25, Zimbabwean information project Kubatana curated its top-10 titles from Exclusive Books’ Pan-African Writing ...
