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.
David Hogg and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discuss replacement theory, the gunman’s manifesto, and how we organize against violent white supremacy.
Companies are unreliable allies in the fight for queer rights and social justice. We must rebuild a working people’s movement.
Decades of biological research haven’t improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain.
Though a means of escaping and undermining racial injustice, the practice comes with own set of costs and sacrifices.
Pioneering Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos sought to redeem the field from its methodological fragmentation and colonial legacies.
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.
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.
By casting doubt on multiracial working-class solidarity, Jay Caspian Kang’s critique of professional identity politics fails on its own terms.
A pervasive ideology of “traditional values” has taken hold in Russia, portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.
Colorblind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care. We need both federal reparations and real institutional accountability.
Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.
The Global South will suffer the most as colonial legacies, climate change, and capitalism continue to plunge millions into hunger.
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.
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.
Condemning Putin’s war must go hand in hand with imagining a more just security order.
A pervasive ideology of “traditional values” has taken hold in Russia, portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.
The mystical connection between white Southern nostalgia, the global family values movement, and Russia.
We need to reckon with police lies not only as a form of individual misconduct but as a matter of political speech.
Cities must empower historically marginalized communities to shape how public funds are spent.
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.
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.
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
Boston Review hosted a virtual reading to celebrate the release of our annual arts anthology.
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.
Cities must empower historically marginalized communities to shape how public funds are spent.
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.
If we are to emerge from this era of crisis, we need legal thinking that operates on fundamentally different presumptions.
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.
Vital reading on politics, literature, and more in your inbox. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter, Monthly Roundup, and event notifications.
Our poetry and short story contests are now open for submission! Apply before May 31 for free global/hardship entry, or by June 30 for paid entry.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
