A Pandemic Archive
Max Alvarez’s interviews record working-class perspectives on the age of COVID
How will historians reconstruct our time: as a view from above, or from below?
Latest Back Pages
A Division of Labor
A science fiction TV drama explores questions of slavery and self in the workplace
In "Severance," work-life balance is given a dystopian spin through tech-induced split personalities.
The Soul of Man Under Fascism
Reading Gramsci’s prison letters in an age of catastrophe
A new Gramsci emerges from the prison letters: not the immortal theorist, but an all-too-human man at the breaking point.
The whirlwind is sown.
But the sowers are dead.
And it is ours to reap.
From Issue 2
The Former Essayist
On the Decline of Wesley Yang
What is Wesley Yang’s answer to the question, What happened to Wesley Yang? I realized that this was indispensable to the whole query, even if it wasn’t the solution. I had a Yang-ian feeling that here lay something emblematic about American culture – less in each scene than in the (tragic?) arc of the play.
Barry Jenkins’s Cinematic Technique
A formal analysis of If Beale Street Could Talk
The issue resides not in whether techniques are used, but in how deeply they are developed.
Bloodless Board Games, Covert Colonialisms
On the imperial gaze in tabletop gaming
We ignore the propaganda potential of board games at our peril. At bottom it's a question of agency.
