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History

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

On David Griscom’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas

October 19, 2026 • by Philip Dray

For the past 50 years, Texas has been a GOP stronghold. Despite the good efforts of figures such as Beto O’Rourke, Barbara Jordan, and Ann Richards, the state has remained firmly in the grip of big business, big oil, and a conservative legislature. But as David Griscom observes in his new book, The Myth of ...

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

Art & Design

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

On the first modern media event in fin-de-siècle France

October 15, 2026 • by Karine Macarez

In October 1899, Parisians could purchase a large color lithograph depicting a grotesque human-pig hybrid, complete with spectacles and a curly tail, wielding a paintbrush and smearing a map of France with this brown “caca international”—“international poo." The picture was a caricature of the novelist Émile Zola, or “Le roi ...

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

Rethinking Orozco

When The New School Tried to Sell the Orozco Room

On the institutional amnesia that enables universities to treat artworks as fungible assets

June 16, 2026 • by Gil Bittner

Art has always been treated as an investment. The Italian Renaissance was bankrolled by patrons wishing to glorify God—and their own families and administrations. Today, blue-chip art buyers park their assets in storage lockers in tax-friendly free ports, openly treating art as capital rather than culture. Yet it feels different ...

When The New School Tried to Sell the Orozco Room

Rethinking Orozco

An Artwork Animated by Its Audience

The principles of dynamic symmetry behind José Clemente Orozco’s Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood

June 3, 2026 • by Xavier Moyssén Álvarez

—To my father, Xavier Moyssén Lechuga When José Clemente Orozco received a commission to paint a mural cycle at the New School for Social Research in late 1930, he was told that the murals would be on the walls of the student dining room. The room would have people moving in ...

Politics

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

June 2, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum

I have a friend, let’s call him SJ, who is passionate about social justice. He majored in political science and keeps apace with all the latest goings on domestically and abroad. He parlays this knowledge into a dozen or so savvy Instagram stories per day on topics ranging from, to ...

Rethinking Orozco

If These Walls Could Talk

In a room at The New School, the revolutionaries are still arguing

May 14, 2026 • by Julia Foulkes

The public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting. They don’t care for the show itself, they prefer TO LISTEN to the barker outside.— José Clemente Orozco, in Orozco “Explains” (1940) CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Portrait of Joseph Stalin, revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union: "Struggle in the ...

Interviews

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

May 14, 2026 • by Cleo Levin and Megan Milks

Megan Milks’s portrait-in-essays Mega Milk (Feminist Press, 2026) has a straightforward premise: It’s a book about milk. But beneath the surface, it’s a multi-dimensional look at American dairy and all its associations. This collection is about transness, queerness, whiteness, family, farming, and much more. It takes the staid category of ...

Film & Performing Arts

Choreographing the Handshake of Capitalism

In Making Movement Modern, Whitney E. Laemmli explores the dizzying story of Labanotation, a movement visualization system that promised the key to self-understanding

May 7, 2026 • by Madeleine Adams

Have you ever watched a video of yourself and wondered, “Why do my hands look so stiff when I gesture?” or “Geez, my walk is really galumphing!” And then, inevitably, “Would my life be different if I only knew how to move?” To this last question, the adherents of the ...

Choreographing the Handshake of Capitalism

Rethinking Orozco

A Landscape Inside a Tent

On embodied learning with José Clemente Orozco

May 1, 2026 • by Pascal Glissmann

I tilt my head slightly, eyes narrowing in focus. I take two steps back. Then forward again—my feet almost touching the wall, my fingers tempted to touch the surface: pigment, paint, and the silver efflorescence populating at the edges. As I shift toward the opposite wall, I become aware of ...

Rethinking Orozco

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

On the woman behind the brotherhood

April 17, 2026 • by John Reed

In January 1931, journalist and art-world impresario Alma Reed attended the unveiling of A Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood, a cycle of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco and the first mural commissioned for The New School's bespoke building in New York City's progressive haven of Greenwich Village. ...

How Alma Reed Triumphed Over “Positively Frightened” Critics of the Orozco Room

Middle East & North Africa

Street Tulips

The outbreak of war has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora

April 13, 2026 • by M. B. Molavi

In search of a flower, I spent one day in early March going to plant shops and market stalls in central Malmö, Sweden. I was looking for something in particular: the laleh-ye vazhgoon, the inverted tulip. A reddish mountain flower that grows in the Zagros, the ancestral lands of the ...

Urban Environments

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito

Why is it important to interpret Portsmouth's history of urban renewal as a history of class? So far, historians who have published work on the subject have chosen not to take this angle. All contemporary writing on Puddle Dock and the North End—the city's two neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal—notes ...

History

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

On David Griscom’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas

When The New School Tried to Sell the Orozco Room

On the institutional amnesia that enables universities to treat artworks as fungible assets

An Artwork Animated by Its Audience

The principles of dynamic symmetry behind José Clemente Orozco’s Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

If These Walls Could Talk

In a room at The New School, the revolutionaries are still arguing

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

Choreographing the Handshake of Capitalism

In Making Movement Modern, Whitney E. Laemmli explores the dizzying story of Labanotation, a movement visualization system that promised the key to self-understanding

A Landscape Inside a Tent

On embodied learning with José Clemente Orozco

Street Tulips

The outbreak of war has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

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