The Latest
First Day of School in South Rimal
Classes have started for a lucky few, but Gaza’s public sector lies in ruins.
What We Call Progress
Can we still imagine change for the better? Critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi tries in her new book.
The Kitchen Tables Behind Mamdani’s Kitchen-Table Strategy
Staging sites aren’t new to political campaigns, but they’ve never been done like this before.
The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough
MAGA’s base is more fractured than it looks.
What Are We Living Through?
Three competing narratives of the second Trump administration.
Plato and the Poets
The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one.
Building a Political Home
Activist and scholar Cathy J. Cohen on winning power in the midst of a “generational war.”
Sign up for our newsletter
Celebrating 50 years of Boston Review
“
Mainstream media is shot through with mystifications that prop up our nightmarish status quo. This is nowhere truer than the politics surrounding migration, as Harsha Walia shows in her essential essay.
—Daniel Denvir on Harsha Walia’s “There Is No ‘Migrant Crisis’” (2022)
Forums
“For all the seeming signs of unity, the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination illustrates deep insecurities within Trump’s coalition.”
—David Austin Walsh, “The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough”
“Walid is lucky that his dad can afford to pay for any kind of kindergarten at all, while hundreds of thousands of children are on the streets.”
—Rami Abu Jamous, “First Day of School in South Rimal”
“What counts as ‘violence,’ and what counts as ‘order,’ are always political determinations made by those in power.”
—Eric Reinhart, “What Is Political Violence?”
“The way we lived with each other before involved exactly the ‘social shame and cultural pressure’ that Klein and other influential voices now come to condemn.”
—Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “How Can We Live Together?”
From the Archive
Joelle M. Abi-Rached’s “The View from Besieged Beirut,” published in our pages in October 2024, has been selected as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2025. Read it below:
Get our newsletter
Vital reading on politics, ideas, and culture to your inbox
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975
Registered 501(c)(3) organization
Help Us Stay Paywall-Free
Become a Member