In 1977, the school district of Kansas City, Missouri, sued the state of Missouri for supporting segregation. Kansas City students were largely black; suburban schools educated significantly whiter populations. The government’s districting policies, the suit alleged, produced de facto segregation.
More than a century before Antifa or Occupy Wall Street, thousands showed up to hear lectures on wealth inequality and its discontents from Lucy Parsons, the subject of Jacqueline Jones engrossing new biography, Goddess of Anarchy. A former slave, Parsons transformed herself from a rural seamstress
If you were to saunter through the spruce-scented church of American environmentalism, looking upon the portraits of its saints, you’d first see John Muir, father of the Sierra Club, defender of the Yosemite, a green Abraham with a mossy old-man’s beard. Next to him, his camping companion, Teddy
In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s novel Empty Set, the book’s narrator, an authorial stand-in also named Verónica, is haunted by her mother’s disappearance back when she was fifteen. In the book’s slightly fantastical world, this disappearance is gradual, ghostly: One day, Verónica and her brother noticed
A woman with a set of fake names—Kata, Katya, Kasia, Katushka—has returned to New York after eighteen years in Dubai. Glass towers now crowd the Williamsburg waterfront and women yell at her to get out of the bike lane. Bodega cigarettes cost fourteen dollars and smoking in bars is against the law.
“I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” writes Annie Ernaux’s narrator near the end of her 1998 autofiction, Shame. Ernaux takes the sentiment further in the
"The Kingdom" is a weird, brilliant hybrid of biblical interpretation, memoir, and historical fiction in which the author speculates about the personalities of the earliest Christians. The book is brash in its structure, tone, and some of its claims. But Carrère isn’t doing anything that Christians haven't been doing for two millennia. He’s just doing it an in a wildly contemporary, self-conscious way.
In the month since I began writing this review, allegations of sexual harassment by powerful men in the restaurant and entertainment industries, the art world, and the highest reaches of politics have become ubiquitous. A list of “shitty media men” circulated as a shared Google spreadsheet, sparking
In 2014, the Wu-Tang Clan shocked the music world by deciding to sell only one copy of their new album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Wu-Tang would “tour” the physical album to select venues, and then sell it to the highest bidder. Most fans would never hear the album. This was the group’s way of
There was a time, not too long ago, when we saw college education as both an individual attainment and a societal good: We talked in lofty terms about “citizenship” and “democracy.” Not anymore. “A college education,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in her new book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of