Netflix Brazil’s 3% presents a desperate future city that nevertheless proclaims its citizens all have an equal shot at success. Sound familiar?
Essays
Imperialism: A Syllabus
Opposition to imperialism unites the struggles of our times. To recognize empire is to take a necessary step towards a more just world.
Energy “Realism” Is Climate Fatalism
Americans may not want to hear this, but it might be best if the US is not the country leading the world through the climate crisis.
Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?
How to Educate an American Citizen
What should schools teach about the Constitution? And should they teach feelings, aspiration, or fact?
No Escape
What if comfort TV brought no comfort? Even the most innocuous shows can transform into horror, when the monster of racism bursts onto the scene.
What’s in a Bookstore?
For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.
Spatial Abolition and Disability Justice
Revealing the multiple histories of disability justice can expand how we think of and design the places we build.
Electric Laboratory
“What are the compartments that have been placed around how we understand slavery and genocide and its impact on our lives and the world?”
Haiti’s New Political Worlds
Throughout its history, residents of Haiti, especially those of African descent, imagined and created their own possibilities for new social worlds.
Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
Politics—Not Psychology—Drives Politics
Social psychologists know conservative media politicizes its viewers. But by focusing on individuals, they miss how to enact political change.
Stories of Soil, Soy, and Life Otherwise
What happens when thinking of soil as a living being and force, with whom the human world needs to repair and rebuild ties?
Literary and Manual Labors: Pittsfield, Massachusetts
“I have been building some shanties of houses …,” wrote Melville to Hawthorne, “and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays.”
Urban Democracy’s Documentarian
How to explain the miracle of an institution as gargantuan, complex, and pivotal to society as “government”? Watch Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall.
Apartheid’s Paper Trail
Why did some Black South Africans directly collaborate with their oppressors, and what was their experience like?
What if Black Women Were Free?
The transnational struggles of Black women throughout history are different experiments in the practice of freedom.
When the Writing Takes Over the Writer
Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy, and the poet James Merrill were joined by friendship, craft, and graphomania: the compulsion to write.
Choosing Empire: America before and after World War II
Both America First nationalism and postwar liberalism refuse to face the challenges of the globalized world that America itself inaugurated.
Who Gets to Be a Writer?
Despite welcome diversification, literary culture is also becoming more tied to elite educational institutions, and more difficult to enter.