Sam Russek interviewed Ramza, an encampment resident in New York City who has been subjected to repeated arrest and police harassment. Sweeps have worsened under Mayor Eric Adams’s punitive policies.
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Protean Magazine
Organizing Starbucks: Face Time with the Billionaire Boss
Interviews with Starbucks union employees by Sudip Bhattacharya describe growing solidarity, company retaliation, and some bad-faith meetings with CEO Howard Schultz.
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The Cult of the Veiled Prophet
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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Wolves
Poet Ryan Boyd’s “Wolves” assesses the “gray jubilee” of capitalist crisis as it unfolds in “cities sick / with envy” and “scabbed with police.”
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Nowhere is a Place: Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon
Marcos Gonsalez reviews Alejandro Varela’s debut novel The Town of Babylon. Andrés, the novel’s gay Colombian-American protagonist, returns to suburbia and muses on identity, race, and the prejudice and hierarchy that constitutes America.
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Shot Down Above Sicily
Poet James O’Leary’s “Shot Down Above Sicily” explores historical memory through the mysterious death of French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who vanished during an anti-Nazi reconnaissance mission.
Read MoreSubmissions Call – Protean Issue 4
Our 2022 print submissions call is now open! The submissions period will run for 30 days, closing on Friday, May 27th.
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Sacrifice Networks: A Review of Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire
Alex Skopic reviews Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, out now from Pluto Press. The grotesque history of this ubiquitous commodity offers a lens onto the environmental and human costs of imperialism and industry.
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Singal and the Noise
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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Belonging Nowhere: Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class
Alexander Billet reviews Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class, a work of memoir and cultural criticism that examines the inflections of class, assimilation, and loss on independent art.
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