What does “merit” mean in a context—like India—where caste pervades public life?
Tag: Class
B-Sides: Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters”
A child’s novel can be funny by revealing how much a child does know, after all.
Public Thinker: Virginia Eubanks on Digital Surveillance and People Power
“We have to build against the legacy of inequality. Intentionally. We have to build our values into our design practices.”
“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
More Mobility, More Problems
A philosopher examines how upwardly mobile students might thrive, and why they often will not.
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home ...
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds ...
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
Virtual Roundtable on Fairness in College Admissions
The college admissions scandal exposed criminal and unethical actions that undermine the promise of the American university system. To get ...
American Perceptions of Class
When, in 1906, the German sociologist Werner Sombart quipped that in America, “all socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie,” he offered a ...
Free the Most Oppressed First
Do we still need to talk about identity politics? In the wake of the 2016 election and amid the ongoing parody that is the Trump administration, the subject has ...
Adoption Anxieties
Given the overall paucity of novels about interracial adoption, it is striking that no fewer than three were published in 2017. In general, reviewers warmly received Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, Lisa ...
Staging Disability: An Interview with Martyna Majok
Martyna Majok just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her original play Cost of ...
The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these ...
Rachel Cusk’s Disappearing Act
In 2001, after a decade or so as the author of well-regarded, modest-prize-winning fiction, Rachel Cusk began to develop into a kind of memoirist provocateur ...
The Big Picture: Social Solidarity
Like mom and apple pie, football brings Americans together. It enables spectators to participate in collective life loudly and (sometimes) proudly, despite competing team loyalties. Because such ...
The Big Picture: Unholy Alliances
Andrew Jackson had good reason to believe that his first presidential election, of 1824, had been rigged. He had won the popular vote but not an Electoral College majority. Jackson was hated by elite ...
The Big Picture: The Right Type of Citizenship
“The prime problem of our nation,” explained Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 Osawatomie, Kansas, speech on economic nationalism, “is to get the right type of good citizenship.” It still is. Working ...
The Constitution: When Less Is More
If music is the space between the notes, the United States Constitution is a magnum opus of silence. At about 4,500 words, it’s pretty slim, and there’s a lot you’d expect to see in a foundational ...
