The Revolutionary Beethoven
In the year of the great composer’s 250th birthday, we can retune our ears to pick up the subversive and passionately democratic nature of his music.
Spring 2025
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Return of the Titans: Succession and the Rebirth of Dynastic Capitalism
Family capitalism remains the dream of millions of wannabe and petty entrepreneurs. In Succession, it’s a seductive nightmare.
On the Dole with Ken Loach
Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake shows the cruelties of the UK’s benefits system, but fails to challenge the idea that benefits should only go to the “deserving” poor.
Slavery on Screen 
The films about slavery that came out during the Obama years have given us more powerful and nuanced representations of slavery than we have seen before.
I’ll Take Care of You Tonight
Emerging alongside the growth of the service industry is a new interest in the literary expression of this kind of labor, with the female worker at its center.
The World of Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich’s politics developed over many years because she came by them as an artist—which may be what allowed her to become, unusually, both more self-questioning and more combative as she aged.
Not All the Single Ladies
The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism.
What Happened to the Rock Critic?
Did Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed “Dean of Rock Critics,” help kill off his own project?
Booked #2: Wonder Woman and the History of Feminism
Tim Shenk talks with historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore about Wonder Woman and the lost history of feminism.
The Radical Ellen Willis
For Willis, rock was sex, which was Freud, which was Marx, which was labor, which was politics and therefore a reason to vote or protest.
Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of today’s growing inequality.
The Microhistorian
The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore Knopf, 2012, 304 pp. The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore Princeton University Press, 2012, 420 pp. In high school, Jill Lepore—now an Americanist …
The Plutocratic Imagination
Books discussed in this essay: A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Knopf, 2010, 288 pp. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, 2012, 328 pp. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, Little, …
Love in the Time of Privatization
“Social relationships mirror wage relationships in structure and tone, but without the explicit clarity of a wage relationship”: a review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Outsourced Self.
Zionism and Its Discontents
Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Peter Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing.
