Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

How do we reconcile these coexisting realities?

This July, two of the three party-backed candidates in the Mexican presidential elections were women. Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left-wing party, MORENA (an acronym for “Movement for National Regeneration”) won with between 58.3 and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest percentage in Mexico's democratic history. As ...
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Mexico’s First Woman President Inherits a Crisis of Femicide

Enter the Glow

Hannah Burns explores identity, escapism, and queer belonging in I Saw the TV Glow

Sometimes the only place we can be ourselves is inside the media we consume. Sometimes that is where we see options, where we feel less “other.”  Watching I Saw the TV Glow, I loved the thought that Jane Schoenbrun’s amazing new film will join a queer film canon in which a ...
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Enter the Glow

What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

On making music for girls

When Courtney Love popped up in my Taylor Swift–heavy Instagram explore page, I rolled my eyes. Like almost everyone on the internet, I’ve been inundated with posts on Swift’s love life, feuds, and new releases. It turned out that, in an interview with the Standard, Courtney Love had declared, “Taylor ...
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What Courtney Love Knows About Taylor Swift

How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

A conversation with Ronnie Grinberg about her book Write Like a Man

In this biographical study of the New York Jewish intellectuals behind journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, Grinberg focuses on prominent post war writers and editors like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol, many of them native New Yorkers and graduates of City College....

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How American Jewish Marxists Forged a Macho Style for Public Intellectuals

Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

Girlhood and spectacle in a gutsy debut novel

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel portrays girlhood as a full-throttle battle, fought out over the course of a high school girls’ boxing tournament. Duking out their identities in the male-dominated space of the boxing ring, the protagonists of Headshot (Viking, 2024) both enact and undermine the familiar spectacle of ...
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Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot

The New Urgency of LGBTQ+ Pride in Paris

A celebration or a rebellion?

"We are transfeminists, radicals, and afroqueers,” marchers shouted. “Get used to it!" Their call echoed through a crowd of 28,000, gathered in the heart of Paris to advocate for the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Summer is Pride season around the world, and Paris is no exception. The main event ...
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The New Urgency of LGBTQ+ Pride in Paris

From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

Why are my friends talking like incels?

“Been gymmaxxing lately,” my friend quipped as he made a protein shake.  “Proteinpilled too,” I said. My generation is speaking a new slang—new to us, anyway. Not quite ubiquitous, but familiar to that contingent of chronically online youth (and is that phrase not becoming a tautology?). These are phrases borrowed from incels, ...
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From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

Bad Breaking

The anti-Black racism and sexism behind the sport’s lackluster Olympic debut

The inclusion of breakdancing in the Paris Olympics this year turned out to be nothing short of a spectacle. From the beginning, the sport was met with hostility and confusion. Australian squash player Michelle Martin, frustrated after years of lobbying for the inclusion of her sport, called breaking’s debut a ...
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Bad Breaking

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

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