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Robin D. G. Kelley and Bongani Madondo honor the writer’s life, work, and legacy.
An anthropologist reflects on West African divination as a case study in hope during times of great uncertainty.
From critical race theory to COVID-19 vaccines, here’s what you loved the most.
The Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts school, still uses electric shock therapy to punish disabled students. How can an entire field of mental health accept this as fine?
The militarization of gun culture among both civilians and police reflects an increasingly energetic defense of white rule in the United States. This has been facilitated in part by an NRA-led reinterpretation of what the Second Amendment meant by “militia”.
The field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion, despite its universalist claims.
Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. The disastrous episode reveals much about the country’s long struggle for Black sovereignty while always under the threat of U.S. empire.
A sweeping new history of humanity upends the story of civilization, inviting us to imagine how our own societies could be radically different.
Concerns about long-term side effects have helped fuel vaccine hesitancy. An immunologist explains why we can be confident in vaccine safety.
Conspiracy theories like QAnon are ultimately a social problem rather than a cognitive one. We should blame politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals.
Knowing takes radical collaboration: an openness to being persuaded as much as an eagerness to persuade.
Turning a blind eye to the realities of racial injustice, the highly orchestrated right-wing attacks cast a body of scholarship about race in the law as a great threat to American society.
Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.
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.
Effective responses to violence—preventing it, interrupting it, holding people accountable, and helping people heal—already exist. We need to learn from and invest in them.
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.
Studying the social world requires more than deference to data. In some cases, it may even require that we reject findings—no matter the prestige or sophistication of the technical apparatus on which they are built.
As a culture of protest took hold in 1960s LA, communities of color also prioritized a radical tradition of care, emphasizing mutual aid, community control, and the transformative power of art and politics.
Instead of deterring sexual violence, criminalization has empowered policing and punishment. To prevent both sexual and state-inflicted abuse, we must embrace restorative justice.
The United States ranked first on health security; then came COVID-19. In place of technocratic hubris, we need robust new forms of democratic humility.
Physicians have been fighting for health justice for decades. To succeed, we need practical models for collectively remaking our systems of care.
Our mastery over microbes is only a few decades old. It is also far more precarious than we imagine.
Concerns about long-term side effects have helped fuel vaccine hesitancy. An immunologist explains why we can be confident in vaccine safety.
If we want to address vaccine hesitancy in the health care system, we must treat its lowest paid workers better.
Defying conventional political labels and capitalizing on widespread distrust, a range of new movements share the conviction that all power is conspiracy.
Poetry
Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits
Poetry
As my relatives melted, I stood
on one leg, raised my arms, eyes shut, & thought:
tree tree tree as death passed me—untouched.
Poetry
Hazem Fahmy was a finalist for the 2019 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest and this poem appeared in our arts anthology Allies.
Poetry
On any map in any so-called season,
I can recognize myself at least once.
We can find reconciliation and closure in poetry, despite the forces that engender grief and dispossession. Three new poetry collections refuse the binaries and amnesia that so often characterize American mourning.
Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.
Why we should err on the side of inaction—and why we won’t.
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.
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.
With globalization under increasing scrutiny, national governments are poised to exert more power over markets.
The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. The only solution is a decisive retreat from globalized finance.
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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With news of the passing of bell hooks, we revisit a roundtable she participated in on the relationship between Black intellectuals and the wider Black community.
“I do believe that if we have greater spaces for us to speak the truth of our drug addiction, our money crisis, our all-of-those-things, we will also find ourselves linked more fundamentally to other Black people in ways that suggest there are many things that do not distinguish us.” Read more.
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