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The patchwork of government regulations around sex and gender causes endless misery for transgender people. A new book considers how gender became so integral to bureaucracy.
As Roe is struck down by the Supreme Court, we bring together recent and archival essays to assess what is at stake—and how we might move from reproductive rights to reproductive justice.
The systems that harm animals go hand in hand with systems that harm humans. Combating them requires inter-species solidarity.
Its illegitimacy goes far beyond the war on drugs.
We must reject the legal liberalism that attempts to cordon off constitutional questions from democratic politics.
Critics say human rights discourse blunts social transformation. It doesn’t have to.
How a new class of “salts”—radicals who take jobs to help unionization—is boosting the organizing efforts of long-term workers.
Decades of biological research haven’t improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain.
With the invasion causing a global shortage of sunflower oil, palm oil is back on the rise. But the commodity’s bloody history is instructive of how global capitalism can and can’t be fixed.
While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.
Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.
The black feminist Combahee River Collective manifesto and E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie share the diagnosis that the wealthy and powerful will take every opportunity to hijack activist energies for their own ends.
The mystical connection between white Southern nostalgia, the global family values movement, and Russia.
A pervasive ideology of “traditional values” has taken hold in Russia, portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.
Condemning Putin’s war must go hand in hand with imagining a more just security order.
Poland and Russia both think of Ukraine as a seat of authentic Slavic culture. A new translation of Józef Czapski’s war memoir highlights how this has often clashed with Ukraine’s independence.
With the invasion causing a global shortage of sunflower oil, palm oil is back on the rise. But the commodity’s bloody history is instructive of how global capitalism can and can’t be fixed.
The Global South will suffer the most as colonial legacies, climate change, and capitalism continue to plunge millions into hunger.
Its illegitimacy goes far beyond the war on drugs.
We need to reckon with police lies not only as a form of individual misconduct but as a matter of political speech.
The authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. discuss why racialized state violence and gender-based violence have to be fought together.
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.
Poetry
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
Poetry
An Abortion Ban
is a body snatcher,
is an ethnic cleansing.
The uterus is a cave,
is an incubator, is a vault,
is a self-destructing bomb,
is a thoroughfare.
Poetry
. . . I am
nott afrayde of swells
that lift mee
off my feet,
or of a strong
undertow
Poetry
The therapist says,
Picture a bird in your mind
What kind of bird is it?
Kemi Alabi’s Academy of American Poets First Book Award–winning Against Heaven answers generations of spiritual violence and threatened damnation with reclamation, repopulation, and a redefinition of heaven.
Poetry
our bloom game too strong / altar stays red candle cinnamon-lit
sweet flicker cracking into prance
As the neoliberal order unravels, the international economic system can and must make room for cooperative forms of state-driven development.
Corporate restructurings are not a cure-all, but they would tilt the balance of power toward ordinary Americans.
How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.
The threat to American democracy springs, most fundamentally, from the social fragmentation wrought by a post-industrial economy.
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.
Going beyond constitutional jurisprudence as conventionally understood, some of today’s top legal experts consider the ways that legal thinking has bolstered—rather than corrected—injustice.
If conservative approaches have been well served by court-centered change, contributors to Rethinking Law consider how progressive ones might rely on movement-centered, legislative, and institutional change.
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It is time to stop talking about Roe as the touchstone for abortion rights and to start imagining what law and policy can do to facilitate affordable and available services.
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