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No Laughing Matter: Martin Amis takes on the Gulag
House of Meetings by Martin Amis {…}
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Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of...
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More Horror Than Hope: The Comic Art of
Since the late 1970s, World War 3 Illustrated has channeled comic artists’ outrage at a world of endless war, ecological exploitation, and the brutalization of social relations. {…}
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The People vs. Laura Kipnis
“Sledgehammering feminine shame and smearing menstrual blood all over its covenants” isn’t a perfect description of what Kipnis has done with her writing, but it comes close. Continue Reading…
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Fantasies of Federalism
Why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling? Continue Reading…
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The Calling
If being an academic today is a profession, it’s one that is, for the vast majority, almost bereft of professionalism’s worldly benefits. Continue Reading…
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The Triumph of Corruption
Corruption today represents not a failure of individual ethics, as the Supreme Court renders it, or a side-effect of poorly designed laws, but an intensifying standoff between capitalism and democracy....
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Kill Your Idols
Sonic Youth’s DIY ethic couldn’t sustain itself in the face of a corporate world eager to market youthful anger like any other commodity. But Kim Gordon’s remarkable new book shows that no matter how...
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What Happened to the Rock Critic?
Did Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics,” help kill off his own project?Continue Reading…
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Reorganizing Labor
As unions come under attack in a changing economy, Thomas Geoghegan’s latest book outlines a new strategy for protecting workers that takes on both big labor and Democrats’ intransigence.Continue...
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Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing
For all his channeling of James Baldwin, Coates seems to have forgotten that black people “can’t afford despair.”Continue Reading…
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Surreality TV
In his new book, Peter Pomerantsev depicts Russia as a place that has descended into a madness fed by the television programs that it itself inspires. But a crucial element is missing.Continue Reading…
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Hate Expectations
Jonathan Franzen’s quixotic war against the internetContinue Reading…
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Camus on Trial
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen Other Press, 2015, 143 pp. People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of...
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A Book as Big as Life
City on Fire—Garth Risk Hallberg’s massive and elaborately constructed novel about New York in the 1970s—offers the contours of the great social novel. But it struggles to reveal the ways in which...
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Billionaire Ideologues, Unruly Voters, and the Future of the Republican Party
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a magisterial portrait of the right-wing billionaires who have “weaponized” conservative philanthropy and pulled the GOP ever further right. Yet Mayer’s account fails to...
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Pulp Nonfiction
“Zippy” creator Bill Griffith’s new book Invisible Ink is a curious masterpiece, merging the real-life personal saga of his mother with the story of the forgotten pulps.Continue Reading…
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Trickle-Down Feminism, Revisited
“Having it all” is not a feminist theory of change.Continue Reading…
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Into the Institutions
The left neglects the institutional structures of democracy at its own peril. In his latest book, political theorist Jeremy Waldron offers a welcome corrective.Continue Reading…
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