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Criticism

Politics

Obama's Original Sin

A new insider account reveals how the Obama administration’s botched bailout deal not only reinforced neoliberal Clintonism, but also foreshadowed an ongoing failure to fulfill campaign promises.

Eric Rauchway

Literature & Culture, Race

Aretha Franklin’s Soul

‘Amazing Grace,’ the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.

Ed Pavlić

Literature & Culture, Philosophy & Religion

A Hidden Order of Reality

Far from being consigned to the ash heap of intellectual fashions, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a new biography shows, is in many ways still with us.

Gili Kliger

Philosophy & Religion

The Myths of Enlightenment

For the philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, myths and metaphors were pivotal to philosophical thinking, not opposed to it.

Marta Figlerowicz

Race

Succeeding While Black

Michelle Obama’s new book reduces racial inequality to a matter of psychological impairment that can be overcome through grit and grin. This is a dangerous proposition.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Reading Lists

Our Best Film Writing For Oscars Weekend

Lars von Trier. Stanley Kubrick. Michael Haneke. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Literature & Culture

Dystopia Is Everywhere

Hye-young Pyun’s surreal, violent novels reject stereotypes about Korean women’s writing, taking up global themes of environmental collapse and the loneliness of city life.

Jae Won Chung

Poetry

The Limits of Cosmopolitanism

With the dire turn in global politics, Donna Stonecipher’s poetry of globalization and displacement possesses an unprecedented urgency.

Bonnie Costello

Literature & Culture

Was Architecture Better Under Socialism?

Yugoslavia produced a thrilling variety of buildings—frequently departing from the prefabricated monotony of the Eastern Bloc.

Anthony Paletta

Philosophy & Religion

Don't Overthink It

A new book wants us to navigate life’s crossroads with the precision of a military exercise. But personal decisions are more difficult than even the most consequential political decisions.

Agnes Callard

Race

What Happened to Kanye West?

Kanye represents what happens when the liberties of artistic genius are confused for political insight.

Christopher Lebron

Literature & Culture

Chronicling the Last Days of Old New York

In his acerbic and often hilarious Village Voice column, Gary Indiana documented a cultural world being lost to AIDS and corporate greed.

Jeremy Lybarger

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