Latest
July 19, 2024
The Ink in the Inkwell | Literature of the Black Resort Town
Melvin Backman
In the third chapter of Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, Great Expectations, David Hammond finds himself on Martha’s Vineyard, fundraising among friendly wallets vacationing on-island. He is an aide to an unnamed Barack Obama stand-in (“the Senator”) who is campaigning for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. As Karen Cox, the bundler David is boarding with, counts out sixty thousand dollars in checks — “twice my salary,” he notes — she...
July 19, 2024
Reading Oneself | Auto-Critics and the Sylvia Plath Problem
Frances Lindemann
There are at least two Sylvia Plaths. One was born on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston. This Sylvia Plath summered on the Massachusetts coastline and loved to swim. She was obsessed with baking; interested in mythology; equally determined and ambitious when it came to losing her virginity, getting straight A’s, and publishing in The New Yorker. She was a star literature student at Smith College, when she also...
July 18, 2024
Skill Issues | Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Its Discontents
Lily Scherlis
When Marsha Linehan was seventeen, she developed terrible headaches. The family doctor didn’t seem to know what was causing them, so Linehan saw a psychiatrist, who recommended a two-week inpatient “diagnostic evaluation” at the Institute of Living, a private mental hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. A few days later she was cutting herself with the smashed lenses of her glasses. The staff psychiatrists moved her to a ward for “the most...
July 17, 2024
“History as It Is Happening” | An Interview With Rachel Kushner
The Drift
Rachel Kushner’s acclaimed novels — Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room — have immersed readers in mid-century Cuba, the New York art world of the 1970s, and a women’s prison in the early 2000s. Each one is densely populated with ideas; her forthcoming novel, Creation Lake, takes on leftist communes, Neanderthals, and the bureaucratic state. Kushner doesn’t call her preparation for these works “research”; her approach to history...
July 11, 2024
The Fortress University | Protesting and Policing on Campus
Erik Baker
On Monday, April 29, hours after students established the Popular University for Gaza on the lawn of the University of Chicago, President Paul Alivisatos sent a campus-wide email expressing his dismay. Alivisatos’s suggestion that the encampment was somehow violent because of the “etymological connections of the word to military origins” drew widespread scorn. But after that tendentious charge came a more revealing — and more ominous — complaint. “Disruption becomes...
July 19, 2024
Editors’ Note | Walled Off
The Editors
Everything about the hulking, sclerotic American state seems to move on autopilot. The levers of power — let alone of hope or change, the watchwords of another, now-distant election season — appear entirely out of reach. The illusion that the American electorate will in any meaningful way “make its voice heard” is looking especially threadbare this year. Free (or free-ish) elections are by definition not entirely predictable, but this fall’s...
July 8, 2024
Mortality Wars | Estimating Life and Death in Iraq and Gaza
Shaan Sachdev
On October 25, 2023, less than three weeks after Israeli forces began dropping bombs on the Gaza Strip in response to the October 7 Hamas attack, President Joe Biden was asked at a press conference whether the six thousand Palestinian deaths reported by Gaza’s Ministry of Health meant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “ignoring” American directives to minimize civilian casualties. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the...
July 19, 2024
Monopoly on Mobility
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
In a 2009 TED Talk, economist Paul Romer proposed “charter cities,” territorial carve-outs in poor countries that would be overseen by outside democracies. The concept sounds so much like colonialism that it has resonated primarily with the political right. But that doesn’t mean the left should ignore Romer’s idea. Such places, the economist — who won the Nobel Prize in 2018 — told me, could be designed to welcome immigrants,...
July 19, 2024
The Right Wall
Ian Volner
In 2021, researchers in the Baltic Sea happened upon a submerged stone embankment built by neolithic trappers for the purpose of corralling and slaughtering reindeer. Dating from ten thousand years ago, it is perhaps the world’s oldest freestanding wall, built around the same time as one of the common claimants of that title: the storied walls of the ancient city of Jericho, constructed in the ninth century B.C.E. and mythologized...
July 19, 2024
Pan-Africanism from Below
Zachariah Mampilly
The Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe describes a “politics of separation” that fuels an irrational and counterproductive fear of migrants. In this frame of mind, the only solution to the woes of the wealthy world lies in further securing borders. It’s a fortress mindset, but one that finds support across the political spectrum, and has been exported around the globe. In Africa, the legacy of colonial violence plays out in...
