Writing in London Review of Books, Sophie Lewis finds the latest from Angela Garbes—Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, a follow-up to her 2018 pregnancy memoir Like a Mother—heavy on communitarianism, or “acts of reciprocity,” but rather light on actual politics: “Garbes seems convinced that mothering’s progressive character is assured. Organized political activity and redistributive […]

Writing for Aeon magazine, Samantha Hill asks how it was that Alexandre Kojève—an obscure Russian-born aristocrat pauperized by the stock market crash of 1929, who would later go on to become an early architect of the European Union—“came to influence a generation of thinkers,” from Georges Bataille to André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah […]

Writing in Sidecar, the New Left Review blog, Alyssa Battistoni surveys the career of Bruno Latour, his historically hot and cold relationship with the left—“Latour enjoyed antagonizing the left; in turn, many leftists loved to hate Latour”—and his late turn, spurred by climate change and the coronavirus pandemic, to “questions of production and class, transformation […]

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’ […]