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Why we should err on the side of inaction—and why we won’t.
On language and belonging.
My patients and I don’t use words like “choice” or “viability.”
Monopoly power has certainly harmed workers, but the solution should be a wholesale rethinking of economic policy—not an embrace of perfectly competitive markets.
An interview with Derecka Purnell about her new book Becoming Abolitionists, how we should think about the systems that produce violence, and, ultimately, the resources that will allow people to live safely.
How philosophical thinking can make truthfulness possible even when the truth can barely be fathomed.
Though the organization’s legacy has been domesticated, its grassroots leadership embraced the global fight for freedom.
Reflecting Boston Review’s standing as a trustworthy moderator, our forums see top thinkers and practitioners with diverse perspectives engage in direct dialogue with one another.
Abolition is not only about eliminating the police, but imagining new systems that work to ensure a fair, equal society where there is no place for racism, ableism, or state violence.
Even as they carve out space for Black scholarship, established universities remain deeply complicit in racial capitalism. We must think beyond them.
Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned, but ancestors to be cared for.
Toni Morrison’s novels imagine a society governed by an ethic of care, devoted to restoring and repairing those who have been harmed, and giving them the space for transformation.
Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it.
Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.
Poetry
Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits
Netflix’s Maid and three recent best-sellers depict the agonies and rage of being a low-wage housekeeper or nanny. But all fail to identify capitalism itself as the culprit.
Fiction
“Every time she noticed he was dressed for sport, she’d head for the door.” In this short story, a young Jamaican man weighs his responsibility to his family against his love of biking.
Poetry
Two white men carrying briefcases walk in on a congressional meeting held by African leaders dressed in Western attire. Clapping at the president who resembles Léopold Senghor. He uses words like “revolutionary” and “independence” and they garner an applause.
Fiction
“The something we had been waiting for had happened.” In this short story, the traces of a missing Nigerian woman haunt her neighbors, who struggle with how intensely they had disliked and envied her.
Poetry
Well-meaning nonprofits don’t go far enough in the fight against gentrification. Residents themselves must be in charge, and neighborhood trusts point the way.
Financial globalization was supposed to spur development. Instead, it transfers money to the global North and exacerbates existing inequalities.
In the most turbine-surrounded community in the world, poor residents understand that their loss—of land, jobs, and serenity—has nothing to do with the common good. Clean energy advocates should take notice.
Education is not inherently liberatory: it has always been an arena for broader struggles over who has access to knowledge and to what ends learning is put.
Democrats don’t lose elections because of rising prices. They lose when they cut spending and raise interest rates, sacrificing other goals at the altar of price stability.
The community development industry has failed in the fight for fair housing. Despite claiming to involve residents, power and self-interest still have the final say.
Because it hinges on who will accept blame for causing climate change, there’s never been so much at stake in the naming of a geological era.
A sweeping new history of humanity upends the story of civilization, inviting us to imagine how our own societies could be radically different.
Nearly two years into a global pandemic, uncertainty has profoundly unsettled both our personal and political lives. In our Fall 2021 book, eleven thinkers consider its scientific, philosophical, and economic aspects.
Physicians have been fighting for health justice for decades. To succeed, we need practical models for collectively remaking our systems of care.
Beyond carbon emissions and safety, the debate must also confront how the choices we make now constrain the kind of world we can build in the future.
Our mastery over microbes is only a few decades old. It is also far more precarious than we imagine.
Grappling with some of the most critical issues of our times, our three ongoing series invite leading writers to contribute essays to the public discussion.
Nearly two years into a global pandemic, uncertainty has profoundly unsettled both our personal and political lives. In our Fall 2021 book, eleven thinkers consider its scientific, philosophical, and economic aspects. Together they make clear that uncertainty need not be paralyzing. Leading this book’s forum, Sheila Jasanoff, pioneering scholar of science and technology studies, argues that public policy could benefit from a much more serious acknowledgment of uncertainty. Also featuring Jana Bacevic, Caley Horan, Annie Howard, Lily Hu, Michael D. Jackson, Jay S. Kaufman, Oded Na’aman, Zeynep Pamuk, Simon Torracinta, Alexandre White.
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Philosopher Seyla Benhabib asks: Can we distinguish political choices from philosophical truths?
“Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica.” Read more.
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