A Fork in the Road
China’s Evergrande crisis, Germany’s divided election, meeting “the other Black girl” in a white workplace, and more.
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September 30, 2021
Capitalism
Mark Frazier, “China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn.” If the financial complexities of the Evergrande case could be boiled down to a tabloid headline, it would read: “XI TO BUILDER: DROP DEAD.” (September 28, 2021)
Politics
Nicolas Allié, “Goodbye Merkel, Hello … Who?” On the German election and what’s to come. (September 29, 2021)
Claire Potter, “Never-Trumpers Keep Insisting that Reaganism Was Not Demagoguery. It Was.” Neoconservatives could help restore our democracy by telling the truth. (September 29, 2021)
Literature
Zakiya Dalila Harris and Zia Jaffrey, “What Happens to “Black Woman Number Two” in a White Workplace?” The two New School authors sit down to discuss Harris’s debut novel, The Other Black Girl. (September 29, 2021)
Read an excerpt from Harris’s best-selling thriller, which follows two young Black women who meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York book publishing. (September 29, 2021)
Mónica Lavín, “Meaty Pleasures.” In a new fiction collection selected and translated by D. P. Snyder, the award-winning Mexican author explores passion and pain: “In the whirlwind of hook-ups I saw every afternoon, that stitching together of Thursday after Thursday with love and desire was the essence of continuity.” (September 25, 2021)
Classics Reconsidered
Steven Stoll, “A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods.” Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back to the first industrial workers in the United States—young women from the countryside. (September 28, 2021)
Our Columnists
Heather Cox Richardson, “Battle of the Budget.” Republicans filibuster a bill that would keep the government operating. (September 29, 2021)
John Stoehr, “Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court.” What if a major political party had incentive to attack the court’s legitimacy? (September 28, 2021)
Pat Garofalo, “Facebook’s Data Center Fluff.” A snazzy new public relations campaign insists that secretive, resource-draining projects are actually great for local communities. (September 27, 2021)