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

  • “What you, my good Israelis, said”: Sabri Jiyris’s The Foundations of Zionism

    Sasha Frere-Jones reviews the new edition of Palestinian writer and lawyer Sabri Jiyris’s “The Foundations of Zionism” (translated by his daughter Fida). As Jiyris tells Frere-Jones: the book “is what you, Israelis, my good Israelis, said”

  • Hyperpolitics? Yes, Please

    Alex Colston reviews Anton Jäger’s “Hyperpolitics,” filling in gaps in the book’s short argument and arguing for the importance of political formations and activities independent of official political society.

  • The Same Battle, Again

    A.C. Corey unpacks the misguided revolutionary and cinematic hopes pinned on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”—each an expression of left melancholia and mania, of political and cultural restlessness, of the fantasy of resolution.

  • The cover of Cyberboss, with blue and red abstract designs.
    The Workplace Arms Race

    Shane Boyle reviews Craig Gent’s Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management. “Rather than representing a step towards scientific perfection, algorithmic management is simply the latest episode in capital’s interminable struggle to subjugate labor.”

  • The cover of Solidarity with Children, by Madeline Lane-McKinley, a purple downward-facing triangle over tan background with text.
    Horizons of Youth Liberation

    Sarah Brouillette reviews Madeline Lane-McKinley’s newest book, Solidarity With Children, from Haymarket. Lane-McKinley’s text conceptualizes the full scale of injustice perpetrated against children worldwide. By invoking Marxist-feminist theory, interpreting cultural texts, and critiquing sociopolitical conditions, Lane-McKinley surveys the horizons of a world in which children are no longer regarded as…

  • A History of Violence

    Noah Kulwin reviews Seth Harp’s new book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” tracing the historical continuities between Vietnam War-era drug smuggling operations and the overwhelming present-day criminality taking place at the Fort.

  • The cover of "Born in Flames" by Bench Ansfield, showing text on a burned out building and street.
    Incendiary Schemes

    Charlotte Rosen reviews Bench Ansfield’s new book, Born in Flames—a stunning and revelatory analysis of the systematic, profitable, and deadly arson schemes that were perpetrated by landlords and insurance companies in the Bronx during the 1970s.

  • The cover of Sakina's Kiss, by Vivek Shanbhag, showing a line drawing of a woman's face and a Molotov cocktail.
    Romance of the Class Traitor

    Urvi Kumbhat reviews the new novel from author Vivek Shanbhag (trans. Srinath Perur). Originally written in southwest India’s Kannada language, Sakina’s Kiss has been republished in the U.S. by McNally. Trading keenly on romance tropes and genre signifiers, Shanbhag uses the figure of the class traitor to turn up bourgeois…

  • Cover of Robertson's Mediating Spaces, showing two military officers pointing at a board with the title.
    Yugoslavia at Scale

    For more than a century, socialists in South East Europe strove to enact their politics at a scale between the national and the global. Jonah Walters reviews James M. Robertson’s Mediating Spaces, a new book that describes the rise and fall of the supranationalism in the Balkans by examining the…

  • The Parent Test

    Anna Aguiar Kosicki reviews Hannah Zeavin’s new book “Mother Media”, calling it “an intellectual reappraisal of the history of technological mothering [which] casts much quietly accepted knowledge in new light.”