Slavoj Zizek and how the pandemic has undermined “the coordinates of our basic access to reality.”
ONTOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE
TO THE LEFT, TO THE LEFT (A MASS PRIMARY PRIMER)
In Allston-Brighton and around the region, progressives mount unprecedented challenges against longtime incumbents
INTERVIEW: A PEOPLE’S GUIDE TO GREATER BOSTON
“A People’s Guide to Greater Boston,” out now from the University of California Press, is a very readable text but one that’s hard to define. A guide book with a historical, left-wing perspective, it is both thoroughly well-researched and pleasing to the eye: a high-production-value text and a far-reaching survey of important sites in and around the city.
BOOKSMITH GOES VIRTUAL, NOW HAS EVENT ATTENDEES FROM OTHER CONTINENTS
One pandemic event had attendees from Germany, South Africa, and Hawaii: “people were up at like three in the morning to come here, or a version of coming, to hear this author.”
ILIADMATIC: ODDS BODKIN BRINGS BARDIC STORYTELLING TO A TRANSFORMED GRENDEL’S DEN
Besides the voices, the sound effects, like wind or foot-stomps and the open-tuned guitars, Bodkin introduces his shows with the sort of accessible yet scholarly lore that eases listeners into his worlds.
LIFE OF THE PARTY
Slam feminism with a true-crime twist in latest from poet Olivia Gatwood
Back in the fall of 2013, before Trump and #MeToo, I first encountered Olivia Gatwood’s poetry at a Lower East Side poetry slam, which she won. To someone with a newly minted degree in English from a small liberal arts school isolated from a flourishing ...
IHSSANE LECKEY BUILDS THE CASE FOR HER CAMPAIGN, AND FOR THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE
“For me, my story and why I’m running are so intertwined. My story is that I’m a survivor, I’m an immigrant, I’m a Wall Street regulator, I’m a mother,” she says. These experiences “compelled” her, to use her word, to run for office.
BOOK REVIEW: SEA PEOPLE
POEMS, LIKE BAROQUE LASERS
BOOK REVIEW: ANXIETY AND THE EQUATION
It’s not a textbook, but there’s “something you can learn from it”
Ludwig Boltzmann was an excruciatingly anxious person and also one of the best scientific minds of his generation. Boltzmann’s revolutionary work on entropy paved the way for Einstein’s quantum revolution of the early 20th century, and yet he still spent ...
THE DEMOCRAT: JAY GONZALEZ ON TAXES, EQUITY, AND HIS PLAN TO WIN
"The wealth gap, the income gap in our society has gotten to the point where it is starting to drag us backwards. And it’s going to really start dragging us backwards if government doesn’t step in to address it."
A MEMOIR OF WORKING HARD AND BEING BROKE IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY ON EARTH
These two characteristics—physical distance and material wealth—also separate America’s newsrooms and publishing houses from the life experiences of people like Smarsh.
BOOK REVIEW: TWO VEGETABLES THINK BETTER THAN ONE
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants by Stefano Mancuso
In one of Roald Dahl’s creepier short stories, “The Sound Machine,” an inventor rigs together ...
MEET THE VOLS WHO HELPED AYANNA PRESSLEY WIN
“As a person of color, I have so much pride right now because not only are we sending another person of color to the Congress, but we are sending the first woman of color to Congress from Massachusetts.”
SPECIAL FEATURE: PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND THE PATRIARCHY
Brown is retiring this year, and the university she leaves is very different from the one of her tenure suit that began more than 30 years ago. But while much has changed, Brown’s story contains a certain timelessness, particularly in the current struggle by women against institutions traditionally dominated by men. Like an Austen novel, Brown’s battle forces a reckoning with the type of sexism society tries to hide from itself. As Brown says, “Making the people who had done this have to defend themselves and be accountable, that was worth it.”
