All that Dissipates Must Descend
In her short stories, Ottessa Moshfegh chronicles downward mobility on the part of the privileged—and in so doing exposes their unfitness to rule, if not to exist.
In her short stories, Ottessa Moshfegh chronicles downward mobility on the part of the privileged—and in so doing exposes their unfitness to rule, if not to exist.
The Deuce, at its best, offers a 360-degree view of New York’s sex economy—but as the show progresses, Times Square’s street characters become a sideshow.
While constantly pushing their workers to do more with less, companies have found new ways of easing the pressure. Enter the mindfulness craze.
Trump’s election has made Lana Del Rey rethink her patriotism, without losing sight of a resilient, youthful Americana—and hope along with it.
In their new documentary series The Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick offer a sharp indictment of an atrocious war. But when it comes to portraying the antiwar movement, they lapse into troubling stereotypes.
I Am Not Your Negro shows how James Baldwin became disillusioned about the possibility of any peaceful resolution to racism, but underplays the force of his internationalist and anti-capitalist perspective.
“He Will Not Divide Us” posited that we could all get along—but instead became a petri dish of American division.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 refuses the typical binary of climate change fiction, offering hope for a future somewhere in between victory or ruin.
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.
Understanding the “alt-right” means spending less time looking to its leaders for ideological coherence and more on understanding how its base exercises power.
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.
From Dolly Parton to J.D. Vance, rags-to-riches stories obscure as much as they inspire, reinforcing the notion that poverty can be solved by dreams and gumption.
Oliver Stone’s Hollywood retelling of the Snowden saga ends up depicting surveillance as little more than an inconvenience that might threaten our sex lives.
To win the country back from the likes of Donald Trump, the left needs to better appreciate the toxic charm of right-wing talk radio personalities like Michael Savage.
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.