Excavating Diverse Masculinities with Manuel Betancourt

The film critic reflects on his childhood obsessions with animated heartthrobs, queer-coded villains, and Pedro Almodóvar’s violent men in his first essay collection, The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men

When journalist Manuel Betancourt started writing his new essay collection it was simply about the writer’s early fixations, from Disney’s 1997 depiction of Hercules to Mario Lopez’s performance of A. C. Slater in Saved by the Bell. As he continued writing, it became obvious to Betancourt that he was hyper-focused ...
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Excavating Diverse Masculinities with Manuel Betancourt

Understanding Sovereign Lending

An interview with Quentin Bruneau on his new book, States and the Masters of Capital

While we can quibble about what sovereignty means as social scientists, the international system is almost exclusively populated by sovereign states—and I wanted to understand how lending to such entities functions....

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Understanding Sovereign Lending

“A Terrible Time”

A conversation with Camilla Fitzsimons about the ongoing global fight for abortion rights

When I was campaigning to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018, many older people were very, very, very welcoming of the referendum; they had somebody in their family who had had to travel abroad to get an abortion, or they had experienced or known women who felt they’d had too ...
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“A Terrible Time”

I Think of It as a Diary

An interview with Anne Waldman about her book Bard, Kinetic and a political life well-lived

Lindsey Scharold spoke with Waldman about where these themes overlap: where others intersect with memoir, where the spiritual aligns with the political, and where theory and practice meet....

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I Think of It as a Diary

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?