An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
Devin Thomas O’Shea relates the sordid history of St. Louis, MO’s Veiled Prophet Society—an occult men’s club and debutante ball for Southern power elites, founded by a Confederate who adapted a 19th-century poem to serve as a stand-in for the Ku Klux Klan.
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Marcos Gonsalez reviews Alejandro Varela’s debut novel The Town of Babylon. Andrés, the novel’s gay Colombian-American protagonist, returns to suburbia and muses on identity, race, and the prejudice and hierarchy that constitutes America.
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Poet James O’Leary’s “Shot Down Above Sicily” explores historical memory through the mysterious death of French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who vanished during an anti-Nazi reconnaissance mission.
Read MoreOur 2022 print submissions call is now open! The submissions period will run for 30 days, closing on Friday, May 27th.
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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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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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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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Shane Burley interviewed Kelly Weill on her new book, Off the Edge, fringe conspiracism, and the erosion of consensus reality.
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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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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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