An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
As one of the left’s most infamously provocative calls, family abolition is often mischaracterized. M.E. O’Brien’s “Family Abolition,” writes Madeline Lane-McKinley, is a corrective and definitive contribution, incisively tracing abolition’s possibilities and opening a view onto utopian horizons.
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Poet Bahar Orang’s “On Poetry” is a lyric interrogation of poetry’s place in the class struggle, asking “Can poets own guns?” // “Can poets own property?”
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Sohel Sarkar reviews Smoke and Ashes, by Amitav Ghosh. The historical opium trade not only echoes the current opioid crisis— enriched famous U.S. families and helped lay the foundations for global capitalism.
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Amsterdam-based poet Kelly Mullins’s “here, taste this” is a love poem whose central conceit is the labor of cooking – an act against “the red bottle bourgeoisie” who “doesn’t know what it means to prepare a feast / from a pinch of salt & intuition alone”
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Ryan Moore examines Kohei Saito’s environmentalist reading of Marx’s late notebooks in Marx in the Anthropocene—a major work in Marxist ecology and intervention in the degrowth debate.
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On the second anniversary of the fall of Kabul, we’re publishing the epilogue of Combat Trauma, by Nadia Abu El-Haj, out from Verso Books. El-Haj writes on the incalculable cost of the War on Terror—on this country’s jingoism, its willful ignorance, and its refusal to acknowledge its crimes.
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From Issue IV: Luke O’Neil’s short story “Newburyport, MA” renders a memory in the timbre of modern experience, where diffuse horrors punctuate the everyday.
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Zoé Samudzi reflects on the ambivalent figure of her great-uncle, the Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was briefly Prime Minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Despite his own best intentions, Muzorewa would be dismissed by posterity as a Black collaborator with a white apartheid government—though the truth is more nuanced.
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Dylan Saba reviews Ghassan Kanafani’s “On Zionist Literature,” in which the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine founder deconstructs and critiques the literary myths and distortions that helped to craft the Zionist subject and deny Palestinian peoplehood.
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Amid reflections on his time booking shows in NYC, Jon Ben-Menachem envisions new means of protecting communities in music venues and cultural events—and remaking a troubled industry.
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