In The Point magazine, Jessie Kindig elaborates a theory of language from the writings of the American Transcendentalists. Why would Thoreau commit to writing, she asks, when the Transcendentalist imperative is to experience—would not the urge to publish distract from the sensation of walking in nature, or the pleasures of a wild apple on a […]

In Social Dynamics: a Journal of African Studies, Alírio Karina and co-author Duane Jethro explain why the fire that destroyed the University of Cape Town’s African Studies archives isn’t a complete loss, but an opportunity: to “reconceptualize” the archive and, with it, the very discipline of African Studies. By confining their historical investigation to traditional […]

In The Yale Review, Suzanne Schneider offers insights into the New Right’s efforts to construct a nationalism founded in ethnic and cultural purity—and why this is incompatible with “democracy, freedom, and human decency.” Then, in the International Review of Applied Economics, she cautions that “nudging”—the steering, via market-based incentives, of private “citizen-consumers” towards “prudential choices” […]

Writing in The Paris Review, Joseph Earl Thomas confronts the complicated personal and social tango of playing Pokémon. If an evening spent with Tyranitar on his Nintendo Switch means he can tap into a global cultural phenomenon, rekindle childhood giddiness, or even teach his children math, Thomas’ experience at competitive Pokémon convenings feels more like […]

Writing in Jamhoor just days after student protests first erupted in Bangladesh—and without the foresight they would succeed in ousting the ruling party, BISR faculty Nafis Hasan celebrates the “indomitable force” of student power and the role it has played in Bangladeshi history since 1947.  Then, in The Nation, BISR faculty Sophie Lewis reviews Molly […]

In The Yale Review, Christine Smallwood discusses book reviewing as a form of autobiography, and how, in drawing attention to certain elements of a text, the critic necessarily reveals their ideals, sensibilities, and material context. Just as the traces of Elizabeth Hardwick’s plush Upper West Side duplex come through in her writing, no work of […]

In New York Review of Architecture, Andy Battle discusses a new oral history of Rikers Island, and counts the ways in which Rikers has become a machine for legion modes of destruction. Ostensibly sequestered from New Yorkers’ sights and minds, the sprawling jail complex is the organ that allows the city to run. If Rikers […]

Writing in The Point magazine, Sophie Lewis reads the resurgent popularity of feminist polemicist Andrea Dworkin against itself—and against her own earlier feminist understanding. Lewis recounts how she, as a younger writer, drew energy from Dworkin’s vociferous condemnations of male supremacy; revisiting Dworkin’s writing in the present, she longs for a less violence-enraptured response to […]

BISR faculty Christine Smallwood reviewed in Bookforum the chilly, unembellished prose of French writer Constance Debré, whose “novels of transformation,” Playboy and Love Me Tender, shouldn’t deceive for the “simplicity and directness” of their style. In Smallwood’s retelling, when the unnamed narrator confronts the pang of desire which punctures her entrenched boredom, “It’s like she […]