Chas Walker contrasts the finales of two popular movies, both critical of the elite, which nevertheless gesture toward different political possibilities. What type of justice can be delivered by deus ex monstrum?

Historian David Helps shares the story of Harbor Gateway in Los Angeles: where environmental racism met community resistance in an artery of L.A.’s global logistics leviathan.

In this essay from Protean’s third print issue, now online, Kimberly Bain reflects on grief and memory: on the still-resonating echoes of Emmett Till’s death and his mother’s cry, on Nina Simone, on Black mourning across historical time.

Brianna DiMonda shares creative nonfiction from the perspective of a narrator who has undergone a routine abortion—attesting to the fact that, discomfort notwithstanding, the procedure is an inestimably crucial right.

With an eye to Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Samuel McIlhagga writes on the class codes of British diction and the incestuous tangle of the U.K. elite, who preside over a hidebound power structure and decaying institutions.

Pranay Somayajula interrogates the insidious rhetorical tactics of far-right Hindutva ideologues like Indian PM Narendra Modi and the BJP and RSS, who tacitly sanction pogroms while staying at arm’s length from the violence.