All articles filed in Critique & Essays

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.

Owen Schalk provides an overview of Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception”—the rhetoric of siege and existential threat—and illustrates how the justificatory tactic has been deployed by the U.S. and its allies and client governments.

Like nuclear test isotopes, traces of psychiatric medication permeate the biosphere and our bodies. D. Kulchar, with an eye to both Mark Fisher and “Midsommar,” reflects on contradictions in collectivity and subjective suffering.

Lupita Limón Corrales writes with a lyrical reflection on her past year in Los Angeles—the destabilization of housing and health, and the stability recaptured in organizing and solidarity. “Space is malleable. Layers of meaning compete.”

C.M. Lewis of Strikewave draws on Rosa Luxemburg and Irish socialist James Connolly to revisit the debate around sectoral bargaining, pointing to weak spots in the modern left’s understandings that are inimical to building working-class power.

M.K. Anderson discusses the merits and limitations of the social model of disability and considers the challenges that even a better society could face in furnishing accommodations.

The latest round of Israeli strikes on Gaza are cause for reflection on Jewishness and nationalism, writes Shane Burley. How have evangelical Zionists and the Western and Israeli far right hijacked narratives of Jewish identity and warped their universal, liberatory message?

Earlier this year, Luke O’Neil wrote on witnessing the pandemic, the unfolding vaccination process, and the indignity and cruelty of systemic American neglect. This essay is a preview selection from our third print edition.

Online communities of avid shoplifters see theft from corporations as not only personally beneficial, but morally justified, with some claiming the practice as an expression of an anti-capitalist ethos, writes Robert Raymond.

A recent Atlantic article by an economist, Emily Oster, badly misconstrued COVID risks. Such individual-centric analyses obscure social harms and disparities, write epidemiologists Abigail Cartus, Justin Feldman, and Seth J. Prins.