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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
  • Pre-order Issue 4
  • Store
    • Shop
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • Support Us
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All articles filed in Critique & Essays

Turner painting of London on fire.

The Road to Brighton Pier: Class, Caste, and the British Left

By: Protean Magazine June 6, 2022June 7, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays
BJP and Shiv Sena flags.

The Hindu Right’s Deniability Politics

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

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.

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Critique & Essays
Veiled Prophet graphic.

The Cult of the Veiled Prophet

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

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.

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Critique & Essays

Singal and the Noise

By: Protean Magazine April 22, 2022April 25, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays

Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster’s COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education

By: Protean Magazine March 22, 2022March 23, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays

Broken Homes of the Drug War

By: Protean Magazine February 25, 2022March 2, 2022
Critique & Essays

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.

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Critique & Essays

Air Quality Control

By: Protean Magazine February 3, 2022February 3, 2022
Critique & Essays

From Issue 3: John Kazior cracks open the hermetic environments of the wealthy, who breathe air cleansed by luxury filtration systems—while the rest are exposed to carcinogens and climate change.

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Critique & Essays

Elves in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By: Protean Magazine December 20, 2021February 22, 2022
Critique & Essays

Lyta Gold examines the fairy-tale figure of the elf. Recurring in separate cultures—in fiction, in folklore, and in symbology—elves signify far more than the fantastical.

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Critique & Essays

Trees and Other Abolitionist Allies

By: Protean Magazine December 6, 2021December 6, 2021
Critique & Essays

Why do trees reduce violence? How can urban design reinscribe—or alleviate—inequality? Amelie Daigle writes on the structural racism of infrastructure.

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Critique & Essays

The American Prison System’s War on Reading

By: Protean Magazine November 29, 2021December 1, 2021
Critique & Essays

Alex Skopic reports on widespread attempts to ban books and shrink U.S. prison libraries. The carceral system is aiming to both further immiserate prisoners and set up corporations like Barnes & Noble to profit from them.

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Critique & Essays

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