Fortress America Fortress America
How 20th-century liberals helped create our age of mass incarceration.
Sep 27, 2016 / Books & the Arts / James Forman Jr.
The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Revolution The Black Panthers’ Overlooked Revolution
Fifty years later, four women who helped build the party look back on the less-attention-grabbing part of its history.
Sep 22, 2016 / Feature / Yohuru Williams and Bryan Shih
Diamond-Dust Baroque Diamond-Dust Baroque
The Get Down, Baz Luhrman’s fairy-tale remix of the birth of hip hop, offers a glimpse of the beginning of the end of US power.
Sep 15, 2016 / Joshua Clover
Black as We Wanna Be Black as We Wanna Be
Trying to remedy racism on its own intellectual terrain is like trying to extinguish a fire by striking another match. The fiction must be unbelieved, the fire stamped out.
Sep 15, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Matthew McKnight
Who Freed the Slaves? Who Freed the Slaves?
For some time now, the answer has not been the abolitionists.
Sep 13, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Stephanie McCurry
Behind the Sun Behind the Sun
In four books about Syria and Egypt, the narrative arc of revolution bends toward disappointment.
Sep 6, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Ursula Lindsey
How a Nun, a Vet, and a Housepainter Stood Up to the Threat of Nuclear Weapons How a Nun, a Vet, and a Housepainter Stood Up to the Threat of Nuclear Weapons
Dan Zak’s Almighty reminds readers that the United States’ poisonous and very expensive history of nuclear-weapons production is far from over.
Aug 31, 2016 / Frida Berrigan
Warren Hinckle’s Truth-to-Power Journalism and Politics Broke the Conventional Wisdom Warren Hinckle’s Truth-to-Power Journalism and Politics Broke the Conventional Wisdom
As the editor of Ramparts, he helped shape the radicalism of the 1960s, and kept on challenging injustice and “professional megabuck politics.”
Aug 26, 2016 / John Nichols
Ghostly Presences Ghostly Presences
Unable to write effectively but unable to remain silent, W.G. Sebald, like the narrator of The Emigrants, is condemned to speak unsatisfactorily.
Aug 17, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Becca Rothfeld
Naming America’s Own Genocide Naming America’s Own Genocide
In a commanding new book, Benjamin Madley calls California’s 19th-century elected officials “the primary architects of annihilation” against Native Americans in the state. Reading ...
Aug 17, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Richard White