We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Decades ago, Black communist women decided to organize, fight, and win.
The legal doctrine of “superior responsibility” makes the Russian president liable for war crimes committed in Ukraine.
Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.
The Federal Reserve’s bid to “get wages down” reflects the enduring hold of neoliberal thought at the highest levels of economic policymaking.
Democratic theory points to two problems: unjust concentrations of power and a flawed theory of knowledge.
In his new book, the former Fed chair cuts through economic orthodoxy on central banking. But he fails to reckon deeply with its political consequences.
In his new book, philosopher William MacAskill implies that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky.
In the age of Trump, some progressives have embraced state power as a boon to democracy. We should be skeptical.
Condemning U.S. deference to Israel, a cousin remembers the life and legacy of the slain Palestinian American journalist.
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.
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 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.
Derecka Purnell discusses her new book Becoming Abolitionists, how she came to join the movement against policing and prisons, and what a just world looks like.
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
in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.
Poetry
a slave ship hauls / bodies as cargo and / both the surface and ocean floor / rifts. even the clouds break / open in sobs.
Poetry
loving mother, come watch me be patient, / watch how i describe things that never leave my mouth
Poetry
Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest
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.
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.
How might we reimagine degrowth as a path to a better society? Can Black women be mothers without the world reading politics into their every choice? Why, exactly, is U.S.-style capitalism ruining sex? And how can the Italian approach to lunch help us understand Richard Rorty?
In our new issue, The Politics of Pleasure, philosophers, economists, and gender theorists consider these questions and more. Preorder today, and join us as we debate the good life.
Vital reading on politics, literature, and more in your inbox. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter, Monthly Roundup, and event notifications.
President Biden’s recent move to cancel some student debt is a step toward greater equality, but, as Steinbaum argues, more can be done: “The United States has never had free, high-quality college education. But that does not mean we can’t.”
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission