At 11 am CT on January 20, 2017 — just as Donald Trump was being sworn in as the forty-fifth […]
“If you liked this interview, you’ll love this book”: A Review of Sarah Milov’s The Cigarette: A Political History (2019)
[gblockquote]The history of the cigarette does not begin and end with Big Tobacco.[/gblockquote] On March 2019, writers Danuta Kean and […]
The Racist Misogyny behind Your “Does My Butt Look Fat in This?”: Reading Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Every so often, a book comes out that arrives as both an answer to a question and an answer to […]
“Our Dogged and Deadly Archnemesis”: A Review of Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator
In 2015, mosquito-borne pathogens caused approximately 830,000 deaths worldwide. Malaria alone killed 435,000 people in 2017. Statistical extrapolations suggest that […]
Searching for Solidarity in Madeline Miller’s Circe
Released just over a year ago, Madeline Miller’s Circe has since appeared on several bestseller lists and earned even more […]
The Queer Truth: Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble
For years, when I would tell stories of my time in 1980s San Francisco to friends or students, some of […]
Notes on Outrages from Reviewer #2
Naomi Wolf’s latest book, Outrages, was supposed to be released in the United States on June 18, 2019. In May […]
The Absence of Presence: Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
This is a book that might leave most readers frustrated about the state of things. It’s also a book that […]
Who Was the Original “Welfare Queen?”: Review of Josh Levin’s The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
How do you tell a story about a real-life, embodied individual who inspired a stereotype, without reducing her life to […]
Complicating the Canon of the First World War: A Review of Ellen La Motte’s Backwash of War, edited by Cynthia Wachtell
Think back on any syllabi of the First World War and the literature represented in it. For me, those titles […]