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Call Me By My Name

Jamaica Baldwin Rattle
The poet Jamaica Baldwin writes, “This piece was written in response to the daily lies espoused by the new president and his administration, the emergence of the phrase ‘alternative fact’ in the political lexicon, and the simple fact of Trump’s presidency.”

Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder?

Marshall Steinbaum Boston Review
Piketty's radical and largely on-target critique of contemporary capitalism, the reviewer says, was mostly greeted with hostility by the economics establishment, when not simply ignored, stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits, particularly in explaining inequality — in effect a dead zone in mainstream economic analysis. The reviewer thinks much can be gleaned from Piketty's work.

Freestyle Marxism

Max Holleran The New Republic
This new collection of essays offers an interesting glimpse into the work of this consistently interesting Marxist thinker and cultural critic.

Committee Work

Francesca Bell River Styx
He said, she said: The effects of sexual exploitation of women on campus depends on the credibility of one's point of view. Francesca Bell's poem "Committee Work" unveils this not-so-delicate dialogue.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: On Locking up Our Own

Adam Shatz London Review of Books
If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.

What Risk Says About Julian Assange

David Sims The Atlantic
Risk is an incredibly gripping work, one made with an unprecedented level of access to Assange, but for all its intimacy, it still struggles to nail down its target. Instead, it’s more a story of Poitras herself, and the evolution of the movie she set out to make about Assange, who founded Wikileaks in 2006.