Alex Skopic reviews Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, out now from Pluto Press. The grotesque history of this ubiquitous commodity offers a lens onto the environmental and human costs of imperialism and industry.
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All articles filed in Protean Magazine
Singal and the Noise
Journalist Jesse Singal has made a career out of “just asking questions” about gender dysphoria in youth. His arguments have proven appealing to reactionaries eager to demonize and harm trans people, writes M.K. Anderson.
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Belonging Nowhere: Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class
Alexander Billet reviews Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class, a work of memoir and cultural criticism that examines the inflections of class, assimilation, and loss on independent art.
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Off the Edge: An Interview with Kelly Weill
Shane Burley interviewed Kelly Weill on her new book, Off the Edge, fringe conspiracism, and the erosion of consensus reality.
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Primordial Freedoms: An Interview with David Wengrow
Clinton Williamson spoke to archaeologist David Wengrow about his book with co-author David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, and about how their new interpretation of the past confounds conventional histories.
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Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster’s COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education
Free-market interests used fights over COVID protocols to further privatize K-12 education. Economist Emily Oster, whose research is funded by those groups, has laundered their ideologies and given them the imprimatur of science, write epidemiologists Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman.
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The apocalypse will have beach chairs
Poet Madeline Lane-McKinley’s “The apocalypse will have beach chairs” observes the end of the world as an accumulation of refuse: a dead seal, bottle caps, and the literary works of Jonathan Franzen.
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Self-Portrait as a Hackberry Tree
KB Brookins’s concrete poem, “Self-Portrait as a Hackberry Tree,” uses ecology as poetic form to explore love, survival, and kinship.
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Little Dog Day
Poet Gion Davis’s “Little Dog Day” meditates on poverty, resource extraction, and the struggle to survive under capitalism.
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Collective Ambitions: Amazon Workers on Their Union Fight
Sudip Bhattacharya’s interviews with workers at an Amazon facility in Staten Island reveal ruthless conditions, management’s overwhelming power—and how, despite that, they’ve found solidarity in organizing the Amazon Labor Union.
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