All articles filed in Critique & Essays

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.

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.”

Through the eyes of its organizers, Raechel Anne Jolie looks back on the lessons and failures of ‘00s anti-war activism—on direct action and peaceful protest, co-optation, and the forgotten histories of a formative movement.

Innocent Chizaram Ilo writes on his childhood in southern Nigeria, where the influence of conservative Christianity, intermingled with the traditional practices of the Igbo people, has created a receptivity to anti-Palestinian beliefs.

Italian philosopher Marcello Tarì examines the tension between everyday revolutionary acts and the impending sense of catastrophe that marks our current moment. Excerpted from an introduction to Tarì’s book, There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution.

Palestinian music scholar Rami Soudah compiles a chronology of Palestine’s resistance music. Poets and musicians in Palestine have long expressed their depths of loss and nostalgia through verse and song, and artists in the broader Arab world have joined them, producing music of solidarity.

Matthew Sekellick, in this essay from our second issue, interrogates the pathologized behavior of “hoarding” and the tensions in its relationship to consumption under capitalism.

Abraham Ratner on the memory and legacy of Civil Rights hero John Lewis: how the trajectory established in a radical youth can shift under the distortions of party and power.