Shakespeare’s Ultimate Crip Text

In a new Richard III, populism is the pathology

When I bought my ticket for this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Globe Theater in London, I chose a seat under cover of the rafters rather than a place standing directly in front of the stage—a distinction designed to echo the several ways that Elizabethans could experience ...
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Shakespeare’s Ultimate Crip Text

The Furies Reconsidered

A review of Elizabeth Flock’s new book on women and vengeance

Read as a book about how institutions disempower women, The Furies makes the kind of actions that the three characters take seem not only reasonable but necessary for their survival. ...

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The Furies Reconsidered

From “Boring” to “Roaring” Banking

A review of Gerald Epstein’s Busting the Banker’s Club

Harder to measure, but no less crucial, is Epstein’s identification of the intellectual “capture” of both the academy and policymaking institutions—their infiltration by financial interests and the economic paradigms that prop them up. ...

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From “Boring” to “Roaring” Banking

The Hunger Artist

Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein conveys the simple terror and intoxicating asceticism of anorexia

“I watched my body shrink in the mirror,” Clein writes, “proud to discover how powerful my mind was.” I know the feeling....

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The Hunger Artist

Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?

How obscuring the public side of public-private partnerships from FDR to Clinton rendered the liberal state politically precarious

The DLC, soon to anoint Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas as their chairman and presidential standard-bearer, were leaving the legacy of New Deal and postwar liberalism behind. They were, after all, “New Democrats.” Or were they? ...

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Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?