Writing for the LRB blog, Sophie Lewis explores the morbid fascination with which television audiences consume the genre of “reality romance”: “Do we really buy the idea that eternal romantic monogamy is the telos of life? Or are we engaging in anthropological scrutiny of the ideological snares and seductions of True Love™?” Given the shows’ […]

In this edition of faculty writing, Christine Smallwood takes the measure of new film and podcast productions for The Yale Review and The New York Review of Books.  For The Yale Review, Smallwood reviews Noah Bombach’s recent film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s classic satire White Noise—or, his transformation of it into “a story that only […]

In a special two-part series for Spectre journal, Andy Battle takes a look back at the long rationalization process that transformed New York City from a hustling, improvisational, and heterogeneous industrial hub to the post-industrial “suburb in the city” that it is for many today.  In part 1, Battle tracks the many transformations of the […]

This month, Bookforum—a refreshing and much-beloved source for book news, from essays to interviews to reviews—shuttered its doors for good. In a fond, albeit regretful, farewell to a forum that was also home to many a BISR faculty-penned review, we’d like to share these two pieces of faculty writing from its final issue. Rebecca Ariel […]

Writing in the Washington Post, R.H. Lossin asks what it would mean if we stopped thinking about environmental damage as a knock-on effect or simple cost of doing business and instead considered it a form of “capitalist sabotage”—a term coined to describe “destructive practices in the service of profit.” Capitalist sabotage, Lossin argues, “offers a […]

BISR faculty have for many years been publishing their work in The Baffler, a venue for “interesting and unexpected” writing from the left. This edition of faculty writing features pieces by Jessie Kindig and Nathan Shields from recent issues of “the journal that blunts the cutting edge.”  In the Domain of Faust is Nathan Shields’ […]

Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Sophie Lewis reflects on her deep and long-standing appreciation of Marilyn Monroe, ventures some reasons as to why mass appreciation of this femme icon has been late in arriving, and praises a new generation of Marilyn-loving feminists for their “ethos that posits machismo and femmephobia as two sides of the same […]

Writing in Aeon, Suzy Schneider goes beyond the familiar diagnoses of hypocrisy and instrumentalism to understand what is new in the contemporary right-wing’s appeal to religious identity. In the post-liberal order, she argues, religious belonging has ceased to be a private matter of belief—just as political communities are less and less bound together by consensus […]

Writing in Jacobin, Nara Roberta Silva takes a look back over the past two decades of Brazil’s history in order to assess what kinds of challenges, and pitfalls, may await the winner of this year’s presidential election—in the event it turns out to be the Workers’ Party candidate, and former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da […]