“If You Want Peace, Prepare for War“
Crisis in Ukraine, changing our prison system, why we need melodramas, and more
February 3, 2022
How to Confront an Autocrat
In Ukraine, the government has instructed citizens to keep calm—and pack their survival kits. “My homeland has become the unlucky hostage of a paranoid autocrat,” Mariia Shynkarenko writes. “What sort of response is appropriate and commensurable?” (February 2, 2022)
When students and faculty at Boğaziçi University protested the appointment of a new rector, they were met with snipers, arrests, and police brutality. “In Turkey today,” Ayşe Kadıoğlun writes, “legality is still a mechanism used by the AKP government to curtail freedom of expression.” (January 31, 2022)
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Postcolonial Criticism
“For its defenders and practitioners, the melodramatic imagination is the unconscious of the modern novel, a repressed structure in need of recovery. For the naysayers, melodrama is always out there—exteriorized, extravagant, swaggering bad art.” Critics might express distaste for maximalist fiction, but Torsa Ghosal finds that BIPOC and queer writers are using so-called “melodramas” to confront colonization and defy convention. (February 1, 2022)
The Politics of Prison
The Thirteenth Amendment provided the legal “loophole” for modern mass incarceration—but change is going to take more than a constitutional rewrite, Sam Klug finds. “A more promising approach would learn from a different historical moment, when Black workers and civil rights activists understood the meaning of the amendment to be inseparable from social relations at work, on the street, and in the voting booth.” (February 2, 2022)
“I didn’t go to prison because I was a dissident. In fact, I wasn’t political at all. This feels contrary to what people think about mass incarceration. It creates, for me, a disconnect between my former identity as a prisoner and my current identity as someone who wants to radically change our system of incarceration—I have trouble recognizing the continuum.” Reginald Dwayne Betts joins Irena Grudzinska Gross, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, and Marci Shore in a conversation about what it means to be a prisoner. (February 2, 2022)
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Our Columnists
In the latest episode of Unproductive Labor, Will Strong and Kyle Lewis talk to the podcast team about why we all need a shorter working week. (January 28, 2022
Beware investment firms pitching themselves as the saviors of rural America, Pat Garofalo warns: like others of its kind, the Rural Kentucky Jobs Act of 2022 is a long con. (February 2, 2022)