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Criticism

Arts in Society

The Plots Against America

Alternate histories like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—newly adapted by HBO—force us to imagine a different America.

Matt Gallagher

Arts in Society

English as a Sexual Language

Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality.

Marta Figlerowicz

Arts in Society

Remy Charlip's Postmodernism for Kids

The artist exploded the idea of what a book can be. For him, it was not a thing, but an instrument—something to do something with.

Judith Levine

Arts in Society, Politics

Trump's Culture Wars Come to Architecture

A draft executive order condemns the modernism of an aesthetic elite in favor of popular neoclassicism. The ensuing controversy has obscured not just the diversity of each style, but also the economic forces behind the business of building.

Anthony Paletta

Arts in Society

Hyman Bloom’s Messy Bodies

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ retrospective of Hyman Bloom offers visitors the chance to engage with work that exemplifies how art can foster justice-minded, ethical looking.

Alexis L. Boylan

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

The Private History of Ethiopia’s Wars

Maaza Mengiste’s novels reject grand narratives, instead offering uncommonly intimate glimpses of what it was like to live through the century of war and dictatorship that created today’s Ethiopian diaspora.

Adom Getachew

Arts in Society

The Bird at the Window

Since 1970 North America has lost 29 percent of its bird population. New York City alone kills almost a quarter of a million birds each year. More than most people, poets have tried to respond to these unremarked—and mostly preventable—deaths.

Calista McRae

Arts in Society

Herman Melville the Poet

The author of Moby Dick is best known for his novels, but he devoted the second half of his life to writing poetry. What can a new Complete Poems teach us about his place in the canon of American letters?

Gillian Osborne

Arts in Society

László Krasznahorkai’s Catastrophic Harmonies

The winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature serves up an apocalyptic vision of Hungarian society.

Holly Case

Politics

Loving Latin at the End of the World

Many revere Latin as the soul of Western civilization. But its beauty should not keep us from reckoning with its history.

Joel Christensen

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

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