All articles filed in 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.