All articles filed in Critique & Essays

Samuel McIlhagga with remarks on the life and work of seminal French New Wave filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard, who died in September. Godard’s engagement with the political, however capricious, has been overshadowed by contemporary aestheticization of his work.

In the 1950s, the U.S. military conducted unethical radiological experiments on Black communities, including the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis, MO. Devin Thomas O’Shea shares a historical mystery involving nuclear physics, scientific racism, and the cruel neglect of the public good.

This Halloween, Kim Kelly shares stories of where she grew up—New Jersey’s unique Pine Barrens—and of its mythical occupant, the Jersey Devil. The often-isolated people of the Barrens have a deep fondness for the chimerical cryptid, which is part kangaroo, part bat, part horse, part demon, and all New Jersey.

The banning of books in prisons is a particular cruelty inflicted on the incarcerated. Alex Skopic spoke with some of the committed organizers on the outside who are working to fight bans and send books to prisoners.

Andy Hines traces the lines of power between U.S. educational and healthcare institutions. In both, campuses and corporatized administrations are loci of profit—from leveraging real estate and debt to driving “urban renewal,” redlining, and racist policing.

Chas Walker contrasts the finales of two popular movies, both critical of the elite, which nevertheless gesture toward different political possibilities. What type of justice can be delivered by deus ex monstrum?

Historian David Helps shares the story of Harbor Gateway in Los Angeles: where environmental racism met community resistance in an artery of L.A.’s global logistics leviathan.

In this essay from Protean’s third print issue, now online, Kimberly Bain reflects on grief and memory: on the still-resonating echoes of Emmett Till’s death and his mother’s cry, on Nina Simone, on Black mourning across historical time.

Brianna DiMonda shares creative nonfiction from the perspective of a narrator who has undergone a routine abortion—attesting to the fact that, discomfort notwithstanding, the procedure is an inestimably crucial right.

With an eye to Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Samuel McIlhagga writes on the class codes of British diction and the incestuous tangle of the U.K. elite, who preside over a hidebound power structure and decaying institutions.