As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
Tag: Nonfiction
How to Build a World
Storytelling like that of Ursula K. Le Guin or Hayao Miyazaki reveals how real-world politics is similarly an act of collective “world building.”
The Arch of Injustice
St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?
Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change
What should climate-change writing be? What is its ambition as it moves forward?
When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.
Poor Queer Use: Repurposing the Ivory Tower
Outside elite institutions, queer studies has the potential to go hand in hand with broader struggles of racial and economic justice.
The Never-Ending Frontier?
The US imperialist wars in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan grew from US wars against Indigenous people in the 19th century.
Opening the Anthropocene Archives
The Anthropocene has long been discussed in terms of hard science. What do the humanities have to teach about this human age?
B-Sides: Geoff Park’s “Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life”
Environmental wisdom can arise from being a better reader.
Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
Millions of items looted from Africa during the colonial era remain housed in private collections and museums around the world.
Public Thinker: Katherine McKittrick on Black Methodologies and Other Ways of Being
“How might scientific storytelling, or stories of science, shape the struggle for liberation?”
Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later
The Death of Nature wrote a new narrative of science that explored the costs of modernity for nature and humankind.
Stop Reading like a Critic
Think about your favorite book. Now ask yourself: Would you admit this to others? Most would share—but literature professors are not most people.
Users of the World, Unite?
Critical examinations of the internet too often focus on the successes and failures of corporate leaders, rather than on the real constituents of online communities.
Leïla Slimani’s Taboos
Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani reveals the dirty underside of bourgeois domesticity. Is her taboo breaking worthy of praise?
Merit Must Fall
What does “merit” mean in a context—like India—where caste pervades public life?
Swimming in the Anthropocene
Human bodies in deep water feel nature’s power and our own relative weakness. As seas rise, we should heed the swimmers.
Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War
Both violent surveillance and disease risk were integral to Atlantic slavery. That same war against Black people continues today.
Reading Patients, Writing Care
A palliative-care physician’s memoir foregrounds the affective aspects of attending to patients as an avenue to political activism.
The Oligarchs’ Charter
Today we know that, just as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson predicted, economic elites will never relinquish supreme power easily.
