January 2019
The Fourth and Fifth Waves

Everyone knows the first 3 waves of feminism: the first was the political fight for women’s suffrage , the second was the revival of the struggle around...
Read MoreA National Education Service: Berfrois Interviews Melissa Benn

Our education system divided our nation, broadly along the lines of social class, choosing winners and losers at an early age...
Read MoreSocialist Sex Satisfaction

Women's sexual pleasure has rarely been treated as an appropriate subject for economics. Various political theorists have long ruminated on the dubiousness of even naming women’s sexual pleasure as though it were transhistoric...
Read MoreThings essential to life are only getting more expensive…

People keep complaining about “income inequality” and writing books about how grindingly difficult it is for an alarmingly large number of Americans to get by...
Read More“Autonomy made it possible for us to find our own voices”

Silvia Federici’s scholarship and activism offers a foundational account of the demand for the wage as a revolutionary act...
Read MoreYugoslavia

After Tito’s death in 1980 the system entered its final decade, characterized by internal political crisis and external economic pressure...
Read MoreCentral Europe

One way to understand central Europe today is to examine the legacy of two towering figures, Václav Havel and Viktor Orbán...
Read MoreThe amateur spirit in writing

As the reading crisis spreads its tangential wings to include newspapers pruning peripheral departments, some semi-pro and pro writers are forced back into an amateur spirit...
Read MoreJennifer Seaman Cook: Why Did Bowie Leave Us in The Attic?

Three years after David Bowie’s death, one of his last, cryptic videos leaves us wondering what his final message might mean for us...
Read MoreLetters from Robben Island

In a speech he gave after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela described the triumph of the South African anti-apartheid struggle he had done so much to lead.
Read MoreMeta may be the defining characteristic of the poet’s novel..

When I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks. I felt apprehensive, even frightened of it.
Read MoreCarmen Troncoso Interviews Ida Vitale

Ida Vitale is a poet, translator, essayist, professor and literary critic in Uruguay. She is a member of the artistic movement called the “Generation of ’45” along with Mario Benedetti...
Read MoreM. Munro on Philosophy and Silence

Philosophy undoubtedly has something to do with the experience of silence – that much is clear. What’s not at all clear, however...
Read MoreEd Simon: Fleeting Shadows of the Dead

I’ve no photograph of my great-grandfather’s brother, Peter Simon, the Hungarian tailor who was imprisoned by Cossacks and sent to a Siberian prison-camp.
Read MoreWho killed Luxemburg and Liebknecht?

Here is a world in disorder,” the chorus chant in an unfinished play that Bertolt Brecht started in 1926, “Who is then ready / To put it in order?” The answer was Rosa Luxemburg...
Read MoreBorderlands

Informed by an ethos of transnationalism, Elizabeth Leake’s text aims to blur regional and global histories of the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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