On the last night of Black History Month, February 29, 2020, I attended a concert held in the Temple of Dendur, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—the last such event that I would attend, it ...

The cautious merchant and the keen manufacturer were equally unable to resist the speculation. It spread among them like a leprosy. It ruined alike the innocent and the guilty. It periled many a ...

That is: truth without reconciliation. Disputed Pasts rejects a simple casting of the role of memory in which the left ...

The race to commercialize the Internet is over, and advertising is the big winner. This is excellent news if you are an executive or major shareholder of one of the handful of companies that dominate ...

For Lucie Brock-Broido, there was a ‘real’ more profound than the quotidian. She believed that language could illuminate whatever was beneath the ordinary. For those who didn’t know her, and now never ...

What is an author? When Michel Foucault posed this question in 1969, it was largely philosophical. Along with Roland Barthes, who a few years earlier announced “the death of the author,” Foucault ...

I came to understand that vast insecurities lay forever barely hidden beneath his charismatic exterior, whence an arrogance and occasional cruelty befitting neither his age nor his stature. —Abraham ...

Police violence is only the enforcement arm of a system of racial domination and racial capitalism that was with us at the beginning of American history. Here you can find the story of how black ...

This essay appears in print in Is Equal Opportunity Enough?. In June 2020 Donald Trump tweeted, in characteristically hyperbolic style, that his administration had “done more for the Black Community ...

In late 2024, the world watched with a mix of hope and disbelief as opposition forces in Syria finally toppled Bashar al-Assad, ending more than fifty years of rule by the Assad family. Images of ...

In 1972 the socialist left swept to power in Jamaica. Calling for the strengthening of workers’ rights, the nationalization of industries, and the expansion of the island’s welfare state, the People’s ...

Those who write fiction in a language other than their own are often asked what motivates their decision, even though this literary choice has a long and rich history. Joseph Conrad, for instance, did ...