All articles filed in Critique & Essays

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.

Pranay Somayajula interrogates the insidious rhetorical tactics of far-right Hindutva ideologues like Indian PM Narendra Modi and the BJP and RSS, who tacitly sanction pogroms while staying at arm’s length from the violence.

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.

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.

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.

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.