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Protean Magazine

Protean Magazine

An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

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  • Online Features
    • Critique & Essays
    • News Analysis
    • Poetry
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
    • Fiction
  • Store
    • Shop
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • Support Us
  • Submissions
  • About Us

All articles filed in Critique & Essays

A painted mural of industrial workers.

Degrowth is Anti-Capitalist

By: Protean Magazine January 15, 2023January 15, 2023
Critique & Essays

Energy researcher Nishikant Sheorey provides this primer on the field of degrowth: what it is, what it is not, and what its critics on the left get wrong. Far from being analogous to “austerity,” degrowth is instead deeply aligned with anti-capitalist values.

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Critique & Essays
A picture of Godard.

Jean-Luc Godard: On Prophecy and Pastiche

By: Protean Magazine December 2, 2022December 3, 2022
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.

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Critique & Essays
The housing development is demolished.

Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the “Atomic Cloud”

By: Protean Magazine November 28, 2022December 1, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
The Jersey Devil banner.

Sympathy for the Jersey Devil

By: Protean Magazine October 31, 2022October 31, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
Mailing books to prisoners.

The Fight for Prisoners’ Right to Read

By: Protean Magazine October 6, 2022October 6, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
Columbia students protest in 1968.

The Myth of the Public Good

By: Protean Magazine September 8, 2022September 8, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
Goltzius's painting, The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus.

Monsters and Mass Politics

By: Protean Magazine August 4, 2022August 4, 2022
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?

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Critique & Essays
The LA sprawl.

The Politics of Concrete

By: Protean Magazine July 21, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
Karen Revis's Nina Simone prints.

Still Breathing

By: Protean Magazine June 19, 2022June 19, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
A wooden carving by Hannah Halpern.

The Seven-Week Abortion

By: Protean Magazine June 8, 2022June 8, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays

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