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Criticism

Race

Before America Burned

A new book explores how William F. Buckley, Jr., and James Baldwin came to share a stage in 1965 and what their debate over black inequality reveals about the modern conservative movement. 

Robert L. Tsai

Class & Inequality

Games Economists Play

The hostile reaction to Binyamin Appelbaum's new book reveals the tensions within the economics profession over some of its most self-serving myths. 

Marshall Steinbaum

Arts in Society

The Country Without a Post Office

As news leaks of India’s forced communications blackout in Kashmir, the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali is tragically timely—both its depiction of Kashmiri suffering and the poet’s attempt to imagine a better future for his home.

Manan Kapoor

Arts in Society

A World of Electric Children

Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.

John Crowley

Class & Inequality

The False Promise of Enlightenment

Three new books paint a chilling portrait of darkness in Wall Street, the law, and technology. But the apocalyptic metaphors obscure the real problem, hindering how we fight back.

Quinn Slobodian

Politics

Playing with Fire

In their new book, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson describe fighting the fire of the 2008 financial crisis. But while they did rebuild the burnt towers of Wall Street, they left Main Street to dig out from the rubble.

Reed Hundt

Arts in Society

Announcing Boston Review’s new Arts in Society project

A radical revisioning of our creative writing programs.

Boston Review

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

Arts in Society, 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

Arts in Society, 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

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