Omnivore
Populist symbolism can be powerful
How billionaires learned to love populism: Amy Chua on what’s behind the Trump alliance between self-dealing plutocrats and blue-collar voters. John Jackson on Koch and the neo-Confederate (and more). Meet Marshall DeRosa, the Koch-funded, white supremacist professor teaching at Florida Atlantic University. Luther vs. Erasmus: Michael Massing on when populism first eclipsed the liberal elite. Perhaps the most insidious threat facing Western democracies has been the progressive decline of elite
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Paper Trail
Philip Roth has died at the age of eighty-five. The New York Times obituary calls Roth “the last of the great white males,” along with John Updike and Saul Bellow, and quotes Roth comparing himself to the two authors: “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is …Syllabi
Marriage Reimagined
Laura SmithIt is easy to view the vast and varied landscape of marriage in the present day as a radical departure from a more conservative past. But many of these marriage alternatives—including polyamory, open …- "We Are Revolution": Introducing Asia's Proletarian Lit Matt Turner
- The Manson Family Eric Banks
Daily Review
In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers
While #MeToo has exposed the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in a handful of high-profile industries, its priorities have so far reflected broader social hierarchies, giving outsize attention to the experiences of a privileged minority. In a Day’s Work shows us what … 
Interviews
Wayne Koestenbaum
Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released Camp Marmalade—both the frame and the off-frame are folded into his trans-perspectival impressions.
…- There will be people who visit you in prison, and who watch over you at first when …
- PICTURE THE CAREFREE SWAGGER of a teenage white boy, shirtless and smooth, swinging …
- TAO LIN’S EIGHTH BOOK, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, …
- Origin stories are woven with many threads: Some we spin ourselves, while others we …
- Americans and Libya go way back. The opening lines of the “Marines’ Hymn” commemorate …
- While #MeToo has exposed the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in a handful of high-profile …
- The narrator and (barely) protagonist of Lynne Tillman’s smart and sleightful novel—her …
- As relations between Russia and the United States continue to worsen, one of the …
- When Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation came out in 2014, I couldn’t elbow my way to …
- “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own,” Aleksandr …
- When I was in a suicidal phase in my life and hiding my alcoholism from my partner, …
Reviews
Essay
A Poet of the Archives: On Susan Howe
Emily LaBarge
Howe has long been interested in distilling signs and symbols, whether “art objects” or words themselves, into something more revelatory. Considering riddles, lost languages, doubled surfaces, spells, magical thinking, and other elusive forms of expression, Howe sounds the depths.
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