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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All articles filed in Protean Magazine
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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Broken Homes of the Drug War
Far from aberrations or mistakes, violent police raids like the one that killed Breonna Taylor knowingly target Black homes—in service of both racist aggression and real estate profit, writes David Helps.
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The Blood
Germany-based poet Darling Fitch’s “The Blood” reminds us that, seven decades later, Europe still hasn’t fully reckoned with the legacy of Nazi occupation and its “boring business of death.”
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myth-making
Poet Lakshmi Mitra’s “myth-making” explores work, memory, and ecological death in India.
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Review: Olga Ravn’s The Employees
Adam Fales reviews Olga Ravn’s The Employees: a slyly oblique sci-fi novel that transposes the alienation of the capitalist workplace onto a 22nd-century commercial starship.
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