Arts in Society

Say Something

“He’s just a kid. Why are you putting a kid in handcuffs? This feels like profiling. Isn’t that what this is called?”

Tananarive Due

Arts in Society

Emily Dickinson Escapes

Until recent decades, Dickinson was most often depicted as a sentimental spinster or reclusive eccentric. A new biography and TV show reveal instead a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.

Lynne Feeley

Arts in Society

Poetry and Fiction Contests

Enter for your chance to win $1,000 and publication in Boston Review. Plus, entry is free to all those outside of the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe.

Boston Review

Law & Justice, Politics

Impeaching for Imperialism

Beneath Trump’s impeachment lurks a troubling complacency—among Democrats and Republicans alike—with the nature of U.S. imperial power.

Malick Ghachem

Philosophy & Religion

The Weakness of the Furies

Victim anger can be useful to the political struggle, but it can also become excessive and obsessive, deforming the self.

Martha C. Nussbaum

Class & Inequality

For Whom the Markets Toll

Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson still have not reckoned with the failures of neoliberal planning in the wake of the financial crisis.

Reed Hundt

Print Issues

New Issue: On Anger

Our winter 2020 issue has gone to press, featuring Agnes Callard, Paul Bloom, Elizabeth Bruenig, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum and more. Preorder now. 

Class & Inequality

The War Against the Poor Knows No Borders

The Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran and cuts to SNAP benefits are two sides of the same war that the rich are waging against the global poor.

Liz Theoharis

Arts in Society

Painting the New York Times

Nicky Nodjoumi is one of Iran’s greatest artists, but his politics have kept him in exile since 1980. In this interview, he discusses his monumental recent show, in which the front page of the newspaper serves as a canvas for dreamlike explorations of global strife.

Nicky Nodjoumi, Daniel Penny

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Science Won't Settle Trans Rights

Appeals to the biological facts conceal a deeper contest over political equality—and scientific authority itself.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Class & Inequality

Taxing the Superrich

For the sake of justice and democracy, we need a progressive wealth tax.

Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez

Class & Inequality, Race

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.

Walter Johnson