All articles filed in Critique & Essays

Alex Skopic reports on widespread attempts to ban books and shrink U.S. prison libraries. The carceral system is aiming to both further immiserate prisoners and set up corporations like Barnes & Noble to profit from them.

Sudip Bhattacharya reflects on life under austerity: amidst a built environment inscribed with inequality, a frustrated academic joins the gig economy to make ends meet.

Matthew Byrne offers a thoughtful reflection on the history of colonialism and militarism as expressed in three paintings by J.M.W. Turner and John Singer Sargent.

The actual extent of homelessness in the U.S., writes KJ Shepherd, is drastically underestimated—a result of flawed counting metrics, enabled by a broader refusal by power to admit its true, staggering scale.

This Halloween, Kim Kelly relates the history of gravedigger’s strikes. Underappreciated cemetery workers perform an essential social service, but only collective action can win them pay and job conditions that reflect their importance.

On the first anniversary of the massacre at Lekki Toll Gate, Okechi Okeke remembers Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests against police brutality, the violent government response, and the pain and inhumanity suffered by his family and so many others.

Isabelle Appleton on tradition as refuge from consumer society, the contradictions of the “trad,” and the joining of communal values and social conservatism in the Anabaptist sect of the Bruderhof.

Reuben Dendinger reflects on the broken promises of an American academic career—burdensome loans, adjunct and contingent jobs, and the meritocratic myth.

Devin Thomas O’Shea shares the saga of the scions of the Anheuser-Busch brewery empire: their arrogance, their self-mythologizing reality show, and the impunity afforded them for their crimes.

Ten years on, Katie Myers reconnects with five members of Occupy D.C. and revisits its promise, its destruction, and the trials of intervening years. “We have to wonder when it’s all going to slip again, toward some next great cry out into the world.”