Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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Eager or Reluctant? A Translator’s Dilemma
The translator can’t go where the writer hasn’t gone. But it feels good to bound eagerly toward a text’s limits.
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Queer Lives Are Not Side Quests
If you play a videogame and you avoided or never met a particular queer character, did they exist in the game for you?
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The View from the Fiction of the “New Yorker”
America’s premier literary magazine promises to offer a cosmopolitan view of the world beyond New York City. Does it deliver?
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How the “New York Times” Covers Black Writers
There has long been a fear that media only makes room for one Black writer at a time. But that’s always been difficult to prove—until now.
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What Counts as a Bestseller?
A fundamental truth about bestseller lists? They are not a neutral window into what the public is really reading.
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Are Spotify’s Vibes the End of Segregated Listening? (That’s Not What the Data Says.)
What kind of world does Spotify—through its algorithmic sorting of millions of users’ desires, through our aggregated listening—produce for us to hear?
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Audiobooks: Every Minute Counts
People who use audiobooks are expanding what reading is and can be. But they are also incentivizing publishers to change, in unexpected ways.
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Where Is All the Book Data?
Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide—to make culture more equitable—we need to decode that data for ourselves.
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Taking Our Time: How Australian Universities Measure Academic Work
“Who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?”
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Many into One, One into Many: George Lamming (1927–2022)
Lamming never lets readers forget that within that one man—as within all of us—is a boiling multitude.
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Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Theater
Even in Shakespeare’s era, theaters literally shielded people from the state. Today’s theaters might talk sanctuary, but rarely practice it.
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What Future for Forgotten Monuments?
Why does the city of Chicago have a monument, gifted by a Fascist dictator, commemorating another Fascist? And why does it still stand?
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Elvis’s Missing Belt: Tel Aviv, Israel
“As a teenager, I also worked at HaMeshulash for several months. It’s quite possible that I was the worst waiter in the history of the café.”
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One More Embrace: Octavia’s Future/Present
Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
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Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years
Rather than politically utopian, Butler’s stories teach us about grief, consolation, hope, and—most of all—how to live in struggle.
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The World Continues to Need Octavia E. Butler
Pandemics, racist violence, climate change, democratic collapse: it’s finally clear that it’s Butler’s world. We’re just living in it.
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Xenophobia Powers the United States
Since 1892, the United States has deported more immigrants (over 57 million) than any other nation.
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Gordon Syron and the Art of the Invasion
In what ways might art resist a colonial state? Can a painting function as a land rights claim?
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The Best Classroom Is the Struggle
“As a historian and educator of college students, my experience teaching on US imperialism is one of disappointment.”
