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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“No Future” Lexicon: Nothingness
Beyond the existential and metaphysical anxiety it provokes, nothingness also constitutes an ontological opening: it compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos.
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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The Misuses of the University
Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?
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XOXO, Ricardo Ortiz (1961–2025)
To hear him speak was to feel how literature can still shape a life; how beauty, thought, and feeling can move us forward together.
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Eisenstein’s Unrealized Worlds
Can a film that was never finished reveal the possibility of an alternative social system?
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“To Over-Be, To Over-Exist”: Russia’s War in Ukraine and the Grammar of Survival
Even in that moment of the catastrophe, for Liudmyla, it is “we” that will over-be. And that “we” included us, on this other anonymous end of the screen.
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Displacement as Method
I left Gaza in 2014. My family stayed. I’ve lived in Algeria, now Taiwan… We move. This is not background information. This is method.
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The Once and Future Deportation Flight?
78 years ago today, a US plane deporting 28 Mexican nationals crashed into California’s Los Gatos Canyon, killing all aboard.
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Extracting Blackness, from the Middle Ages to Today
I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.
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Will Cuban Americans Choose Trumpism, or Solidarity?
Voting overwhelmingly for Trump, Cuban Americans are now mostly silent as the new administration cracks down on all migrants, including Cubans.
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Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education
We are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.
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“Paris Latino”: How Latin America Migrated to Europe
“Paris est la capitale de l’Amérique latine,” said Mexican essayist Carlos Fuentes.
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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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Cool Enchantment
The ad is seductive but transparent. We don’t believe the copy but appreciate its innocence.
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China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities.
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Toward a University of Repair
What was so unique about Haverford College that it was worth mocking in a Congressional hearing?
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Arendt’s Refugee Politics
One of Arendt’s most surprising insights is that professing “love for the X people” may be a way to foreclose on freedom and on humanity just as effectively as professing “hatred for the Y people.”
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After “Abortion”: A 1966 Book and the World That It Made
Before the book’s publication, no one, it seemed, wanted to talk about abortion publicly. But something changed with when the book finally arrived in 1966.
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Unhappy Halloween: “Disturbia” and the Endless Horror of Domestic Violence
Actor Shia LaBeouf got a real-life ending like that of his film character: Go continue to be a predator.
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Toward the Higher- and Secondary-Ed Alliance!
The influence of K-12 policy and pedagogy on higher ed can perhaps be seen best in the trickle-up effect of the standards of the Common Core.
