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An American Marriage

Zakiya Harris The Rumpus
This review focuses on a riveting novel about an African American couple caught up in the criminal justice system.

Today’s Eerie Echoes of the Civil War

Manisha Sinha The New York Review of Books
How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.

Millennials, White-Collar Workers Bringing New Life to Unions

Katie Johnston The Boston Globe
Workers across many industries are increasingly banding together and standing up against management as part-time and contract work grows, automation amps up, and wages barely budge, labor observers say. Silicon Valley tech workers have started a coalition to unite.

In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer

Shashi Tharoor The Washington Post
“History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West.

“The Death of Stalin” Captures the Terrifying Absurdity of a Tyrant

Masha Gessen The New Yorker
In January Russia banned “The Death of Stalin". This may have been the first time in post-Soviet history a movie that had already been granted permission to screen was pulled from theatres by order of the government. What made the film so dangerous?