“The diva is so often seen as remote and unattainable and onstage; I wanted to see how divas allow for a connection.”
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Speak, Mario?
If video games work generally as showcases of players’ ability, then why has the ability to speak fluently been relatively unnecessary for the medium’s icons?
Civility and/or Social Change?
“Agreeing to disagree” requires tolerating the intolerable.
Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
B-Sides: Gloria Steinem’s “The Beach Book”
In Gloria Steinem’s now-forgotten first book, she offers detailed instructions on how to build a sandcastle, how to tan, how to peel if you burn, and more.
In Search of Logged Time
When we leave the work of remembering to digital tools, we risk the loss of our histories to technological obsolescence.
The Costs of Having It All: On Netflix’s “Dubai Bling”
“Dubai Bling” reveals contemporary shifts in public discourse on feminism and the patriarchal family unit.
Archives of the Surveilled
Arthur Huff Fauset’s elision from literary history was not merely a scholarly oversight but a reality constructed in advance by powerful forces.
When Language Is Lost, What Can Be Gained?
Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language?
B-Sides: Anthony Veasna So’s “Afterparties”
In “Afterparties,” Anthony Veasna So explores the American dream’s false promise of a profitable, progressive futurity.
Our Last Supper
“The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild” is a novel that insists on the limits of what fiction can do. Its happy ending, the reader realizes, is no happy ending at all.
Symbolic Sovereignty: Alvita Akiboh on the Materiality of Empire
“The US flag is always flying; if you buy something, the money is US money; and the stamps are US stamps.”
Bad Beef
Rap beef is form of capitalist accumulation that enriches artists—and, most of all, the corporate suits that run their record labels.
Women on the Verge
Can women poets change the discourses in which they are recognized?
Abolish Sheriffs: Talking with Jessica Pishko
“My perspective is that we should abolish the office of the sheriff.”
“I Love a Dialectical Reader, and Best Is a Dialectical Reader Who Cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan
“I really just wanted to write a novel—I guess to me, this feels very queer—but a novel that was about tenderness and militancy.”
Public Picks 2024
What were the books of 2024 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?
The Climate Is Changing. How Should the Liberal Arts Respond?
“Students ask us, ‘What can we do?’”
A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World
Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.
“The World Didn’t Give It, but the World Can’t Take It Away”: Talking Black Joy and Black Freedom with Blair LM Kelley
“Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy.”