"A song was written through me, and I say that because I didn't write it. The words were given to me."
Tag: Reprint
The Dark Matter of Digital Health
Digital health is solidifying the divide between those whose health is valued and those whose health is ignored.
Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
Pandemic Syllabus
Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.
Merit Must Fall
What does “merit” mean in a context—like India—where caste pervades public life?
Can Comics Save Your Life?
In lockdown, one shop asked for people to submit comics of “a utopian world after we survive this moment.” Hundreds around the world answered.
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a ...
Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against ...
Building a Society that Values Care
Aging Americans are cared for by family members or low-paid nurses. Both lack support for their necessary work, which COVID-19 has only made harder.
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could our internet have been?
Francisco Cantú Talks Borders, Rhetoric, and Climate Change
“The reality of border policy, when you get down in the weeds, is that there is this huge spectrum of individuals who are implicated.”[n
Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
The late literary scholar hoped the writings of older feminists in the academy would help younger women “name their anger and find companionship in enduring it.”
“To Examine Society and Try to Change It”
A Columbia University course serving formerly incarcerated men and women is grounded in an understanding of the powerful meliorative effects of education.
Joni Mitchell’s Ferocious Gift
Joni Mitchell’s brilliant art was always a product of artifice as much as it was of honesty.
The Great LOLCat Massacre
What makes cats so useful as an alphabet for the literature of the web?
Free Is and Free Ain’t
Freedom has always been arbitrary in a world, then and now, when the practice of capitalism requires the ongoing erosion of even the most basic rights.
Pornography Porn
The explosion of porn signals the widespread uptake of questions of objectification, the politics of looking, and the relation between power and enjoyment.
Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them.
The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
Rather than try to kill his literary parents, Eugenides embraces as many of them as possible.
