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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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.
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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?
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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.
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The Matter of Time
Versailles treated the people of Greater Syria and Iraq—Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—as inferiors in need of “civilizational therapy.”
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Democracy’s Defeat Started at Versailles
Rather than extend democracy into economics (as socialism was then understood), postwar elites stifled democracy in politics instead.
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Versailles: Arab Desires, Arab Futures
What forms of political community did the people of the Middle East imagine for themselves following World War I?
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J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands
In 1919, those crafting the fate of postwar Europe wanted their designs to be hidden from view. Fortunately, Keynes had other plans.
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How Versailles Still Haunts the World
Middle Eastern borders, democratic defeats, the US War on Terror: all this flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.
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Making Black Lives Matter in Italy: A Transnational Dialogue
“So, dear sister, do you think that Black Italian movements have changed qualitatively in the wake of George Floyd?”[none-for-homepage]
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Igiaba Scego on Writing between History and Literature
“I strongly lay claim to imagination, because to us Black women for a long time the possibility of imagination had been negated.”[none-for-homepage]
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Shoptalk: Overheard at the Virtual Conference
In this parodic installment of Shoptalk, we salute the year of conferences that have tried to be.
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Rebuilding Solidarity in a Broken World
We can begin where we live, because our neighbors and neighborhoods shape us in ways that are invisible but invigorating.
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Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
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The World Is a Factory Farm
If factory farming is the source of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, could smaller-scale farms and communities—even in China—be the safest alternative?
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Picturing the Lost
In segregated neighborhoods throughout New York, memorials to those claimed by COVID-19 have appeared and evolved.
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Covid Blindness
Withholding accurate information obscures both the impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable and the resurgence of institutional violence.
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Are We in Denial about Denial?
Across the political spectrum, people deny how bad the state of the world is. No wonder the far right’s lies have such purchase.
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Emergency Urbanism
Housing-justice movements ask: How can unhoused people be considered trespassers on state-owned land?
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The Violence of Urban Vacancy
Houses without people, people without homes: New York has invested in empty storefronts and empty districts, even as most New Yorkers suffer.
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Fast Food, Precarious Workers
Today—as in 1968—it remains to be seen if McDonald’s pivot toward racial justice will mean anything for how it treats its scores of Black workers.
