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Criticism

Arts in Society

Angels of History

In the 1974 cult-classic teleplay Penda’s Fen, the past holds the key to escaping the catastrophic present. We too can learn from wilder pasts in our confrontations with capitalism today.

Andy Battle

Arts in Society

Using Formalism to Explore U.S. Systems of Power

Through careful and often irreverent uses of traditional poetic forms, Amit Majmudar offers affecting insights into geopolitics and contemporary life, from the War on Terror to hyperincarceration.

Calista McRae

Arts in Society

Return to the Gay Underground

Dennis Cooper became famous in the 1980s for his transgressive fiction about marginalized men. A new biography makes a case for what his works can offer readers now, in our era of deep suffering and infuriating indifference.

David B. Hobbs

Arts in Society

Reading Camus in Time of Plague and Polarization

The French Algerian writer steadfastly defended democracy and humanity against dogmatic ideologies of all stripes. We need to read and reread him today.

Mugambi Jouet

Arts in Society

Witnessing Grace

In ‘Be Holding,’ celebrated poet Ross Gay interweaves the legacy of one of basketball’s greatest moments with a meditation on Black resilience.

Eric Morales-Franceschini

Arts in Society

Poet of the Impossible: Paul Celan at 100

Among the most innovative poets of European modernism, he forged a new path for poetry after the terrors of the twentieth century.

Peter E. Gordon

Arts in Society

The Mythic Whiteness of the Hillbilly

Ron Howard’s Netflix adaptation of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ continues a long tradition of seeing hillbillies as a symbol of pristine American whiteness. It’s the same nostalgia Trump has mobilized on the far right.

Ellen Wayland-Smith

Arts in Society

The Woman Erased from Bauhaus History

Lucia Moholy helped create the visual language of the Bauhaus, but when she fled the Nazis her work was stolen by Walter Gropius.

Elizabeth Hoover

Arts in Society

The Novel and the Secret Police

In ‘Vineland’, his underappreciated 1990 novel, the author of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ anticipated a United States in which security would become the greatest good. 

Peter Coviello

Arts in Society, Science & Nature

Imagining American Utopia

Rereleased this year in a single volume, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Three Californias imagines three possible futures for the world writ large through the lens of Orange County, California.

Dayton Martindale

Arts in Society

The Prophet of the Far Right

Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so many on the left as well?

Martin Gelin

Arts in Society

The Virus Has Seized the Means of Production

In films such as Contagion, virology is often confused with the invisible workings of capital.

Mark Bould

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