All articles filed in Critique & Essays

by Caitlin Myers. Knoxville has a few nicknames attached to it. Developers and other fancy sorts of people tend to prefer ‘The Marble City,’ because it sounds noble, even though all it means is that people used to dig up marble here and haul it to D.C. to build imitation Greek government buildings.

by John Tormey. Snow duty will extract a price all its own. The hours spent in the cold, the wear inflicted by muscling thousands of pounds of snow, the subtraction of quality years from the end of life. It’s a palpable cost, felt deepest in the ankles, elbows, knees, the memory. Any point of connection.

by C.M. Lewis. Worker militancy and the labor movement are in the public eye in a way not seen in decades. In the past three years, workers have struck—at times illegally—in huge numbers, especially in the education sector.

by KJ Shepherd. The U.S. education system has long wedded itself to an entire industry of standardized social sorting, which leads students to see themselves as a quantifiable commodity from an early age and, eventually, to borrow against their future.

by M.K. Anderson. There’s a meme going around based on the old philosophical thought experiment of the trolley problem. Instead of branching trolley tracks—one track with people tied to it, one without, and a man at the switch—it’s just one track with a trolley running over a long line of victims.

by C.M. Lewis. Even aside from the downballot electoral failures of the Democratic Party, the election revealed an unsettling truth: 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, having lived through four years of his vicious, proto-fascist sideshow, and many of them are increasingly concentrated in rural counties.

by Annie Levin. Liberalism, as it is observed in this nation, is an ideological void on whose surface any New York Times reader might see themselves reflected. So, the role of the writer is to burnish that void to ensure its polish is maintained.

by M.K. Anderson. I’m not the only disabled American who’s struggling. Currently, about one in four Americans have a disability, and they are far more likely to be poor; half of people in poverty have a disability. The pandemic won’t improve matters.

by C.M. Lewis. Solidarity has a new life. Few speeches at a union convention go without some mention of solidarity; it is part of the lingua franca of the labor movement. But now that the rise of the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, among other forces, have popularized left-wing rhetoric for a broader audience, it’s worth examining: when we say “solidarity,” what do we mean?