Everything you have been told about the American criminal justice system is wrong. Or at least not completely accurate. In our current moment of political polarization ...
Tag: Nonfiction
More Nurture, Less Nature?
What if genes weren’t the perfect blueprint we’ve been led to believe they are? What if your body was constantly being shaped by its environment? What if your children’s ...
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 ...
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 ...
“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national ...
Great Liberations: Writing Beyond the Academy
Bridging scholarly and popular writing is what good essays have always done. ...
Shangri-La in the Mud: Vancouver’s Squatters
If you wandered downtown Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics, perhaps you were struck by an incongruous architectural juxtaposition ...
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 ...
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
Physical Books, Digital Lives
“On or around December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously said, “human character changed.” If my memories of December 2010 serve, that’s when social media ...
Idleness as Flourishing
It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to ...
Reading Lives, Writing Lives
My tiny captor sleeps beside me. I don’t know how long it will last, but I welcome such moments of respite. Stolen hours to write, periods in which I feel my foggy ...
Anthropologists and Novelists
Tim Watson’s Culture Writing surveys the border between anthropology and literature in the years following World War II. Watson provides illuminating ...
Algiers: Capital of Revolution
In 2018, it is difficult to imagine what it felt like to live through a genuinely revolutionary moment, one that connected hopes for the Third World with dreams ...
Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?
I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that ...
Let Us Now See Climate Change
How can we learn to see climate change around us? What would it really look like for climate change to come into our homes and lives? It used to be that climate ...
Joni Mitchell’s Ferocious Gift
When Joni Mitchell first came to prominence, in the late-1960s “Summer of Love” era, she was often perceived as a kind of “poetess” or “nightingale” folk ...
Conjuring Anthropology’s Future
I suspect that I was invited to review Magic’s Reason because it is largely about stage magic and stage magicians, a topic on which I once wrote a book myself ...
Darwin’s Beard and George Eliot’s Hands
“Ah even in death he is beautiful, beautiful in death, as one that hath fallen on sleep.” Thus did Percy Bysshe Shelley describe the tuberculosis death of his friend John ...
How Prisons Serve Capitalism
I once asked a class at a prison in Washington State how they would describe the relationship between capitalism and incarceration. “They ...