Tag
Inequality
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Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?
“There is a movement undermining, constraining, and eradicating those who document, understand, and name the experiences of systematically marginalized communities in US history.”
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“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”: Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism
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“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
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It’s About Time We Fail: A Puerto Rican Poetics of Exhaustion
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Kafala in the Time of the Flood
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Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront …
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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 provides. It is appropriate, then, that The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a film about gentrification, centers not on physical dislocation but on…
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Jewish Fragility
When I receive appeals from Jewish organizations exhorting me to fight antisemitism—which, they claim, is on the rise here and abroad—I tend to toss them away. During many periods of time, and in many places, it has been dangerous to be Jewish; but that hardly seems true today. In Europe, the catastrophe of the Shoah…
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Global Cities and Their Discontents: Saskia Sassen and Teresa Caldeira in Conversation
In a moment in which the populist right wing is ascendant globally, cities can serve as beacons of hope … [none-for-homepage]
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Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed … [none-for-homepage]
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Public Thinker: Thomas J. Sugrue on History’s Hard Lessons
From producing towering classics in the field of urban history to penning …
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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 … [none-for-homepage]
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India’s Youth: Small Chances, Big Dreams
The first time someone recommended Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World to me, I rolled my eyes at the title. I wondered …
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Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or early adolescence. When kids embrace models of social identity newly available to their generation, the parents who love and care for them…
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The Inequality of “Human Rights”
What if the global struggle for human rights has accidentally helped make the world more unequal? What if, in seeking human rights, Samuel Moyn asks, we’ve …
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“We Live in an Age of Dynasties”
In retrospect, watching all nine seasons of the original Dynasty (ABC, 1981–89) was a strange choice. I was looking for something escapist, a wormhole to a …
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B-Sides: John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”
In an age of seamless, brazen, total corruption, how should art be? Should it be savage, grim, driven by white-hot rage? Or should it be smiling, gracious …
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Philanthropists Will Not Save Us
What unites Mark Zuckerberg and the Koch Brothers? For many, their politics appear to set them apart. At least before the Cambridge Analytica revelations …
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Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands …
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Public Thinker: Issa Kohler-Hausmann on Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration
While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have … [none-for-homepage]
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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 …
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See How The City Divides Us
In New York the preference is for discrete rails or sharply sloped surfaces, in London polished studs do the trick; San Francisco opts for boulders, and Lima has no …
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The Ambivalence of Appropriation
One day in the summer of 2001, English professor and cultural critic Eric Lott received a phone call from rock journalist Greil Marcus. Marcus had some news …
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The Triumph of Afrikaans Fiction
I’m reading one of the great novels of our time. I’m doing so slowly because it’s in Afrikaans, and although I learned the language for many years in South …
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Indian Queer Futures
The landmark Delhi High Court verdict in 2009 striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the section criminalizing homosexual sex—heralded a significant shift in queer activism and queer representations in India. While the verdict was the result of extended campaigns by the Naz Foundation and others, the euphoria that followed the Delhi High Court’s…
