Section
Politics
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Necessary Villains: Explaining Cultural Marxism
“If Jews didn’t exist, the right would need to invent them, to act as the snake in the garden.”
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Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: Rethinking Mass Incarceration with John Bardes
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, slaveholders in the South were thinking about what a prison should look like for a society that was economically and socially dependent on slavery.
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Civility and/or Social Change?
“Agreeing to disagree” requires tolerating the intolerable.
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Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
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Symbolic Sovereignty: Alvita Akiboh on the Materiality of Empire
“The US flag is always flying; if you buy something, the money is US money; and the stamps are US stamps.”
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Abolish Sheriffs: Talking with Jessica Pishko
“My perspective is that we should abolish the office of the sheriff.”
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A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World
Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.
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The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime”
The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.
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An Open Letter to Prison Officials on the Censorship of “Tip of the Spear”
Your censorship of my book must be understood within a broader context.
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See Me like a State
As stories about flashy new technologies eclipse more measured coverage, it becomes easy for foreign audiences, particularly those in America, to lose track of the actual harms inflicted by China’s surveillance state.
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Breaking the Cycle: Laurence Ralph on “Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him”
“My experience with the criminal justice system is wanting to scream, but realizing that you could also find yourself in a more precarious situation if you do that.”
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“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS
Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.
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A Public Art College in Crisis: Art, Activism, and Solidarity After October 7
SERCs serve as both artistic gestures and practical solutions, aiming to balance the two while addressing critical questions such as: How will we feed people—and their hunger for justice?
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Cheap Speech
By the time the tear gas came we were ready for it. The police had already been gathering for hours along the university’s serpentine walls, forming ranks and donning battle gear.
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What Is a “Student” Politics?
To risk enfranchisement, suffer its penalties, apologetically—on behalf of a political sympathy with others—is revolutionary. This is the kind of action to which humanist knowledge must be bound.
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Leaving a Mark
I found myself constantly asking other participants their thoughts and reflections, to the point where I simply decided to sit down and record these conversations as a sort of informal oral history project.
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Being Columbia
This article was born as critique, but has grown into an elaboration of emotion, reflection, and reaction.
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Reckoning With Our Collective Failure
We were collectively failing in our mission to help students become informed, engaged citizens.
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Liberation, Education
In April 2024, Sofia Rivera captured stark close-ups of scenes from the Columbia University campus, from barricaded buildings to clipped versions of the campus’s famous statues, obscured in favor of the images of protest surrounding them.
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The Fire This Time
I come to you with the same tears of rage, the same feelings of intense internal pain, and the same traumas that you all carry daily.
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