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poetry

You Wonder if You Can Write Something

Susan Browne Rattle
Poet Susan Browne depicts the despair of our times, a sense of hopelessness, the feeling that the future will be even worse than these dismal days.

poetry

Pieces

Donna Pucciani
A surprise turn at the end of Donna Pucciani’s poem, “Pieces,” will shock the reader to consider how sheer evil has eroded our society.

film

Happening Is an Abortion Story About Working-Class Women

Jess Cotton Jacobin
Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s abortion memoir, Happening, captures the violence and drama of its source material. It depicts a time when sex, for young women — without the resources of contraception and abortion — carried unfathomable consequences.

books

Far Country: Scenes From American Culture

Melissa H. Pierson Barnes & Noble Review
In this short book, an innovative literary critic uses what reviewer Pierson describes as "data-driven or science-based methods not traditionally associated with art appreciation" as tools of qualitative literary analysis and criticism.

tv

Was Ozark Actually About the Clintons?

Ryan Zickgraf Jacobin
In its last season, Ozark goes beyond family drama. It critiques the insidious ways that capitalism and political power work in America and the self-interested choices elites make to keep climbing the ladder.

books

Hegemony Changes Everything

Jennifer Wilson Bookforum
This new biography sheds light on the work and life of this Italian Communist leader who was one of the most significant Marxist theorists of the last 100 years.

books

How Everyone Got So Lonely

Zoë Heller The New Yorker
The recent decline in rates of sexual activity has been attributed variously to sexism, neoliberalism, and women’s increased economic independence. How fair are those claims—and will we be saved by the advent of the sex robot?

film

The Image Machine of Alfredo C. - Serving Two Masters: Mussolini’s Moviemaker and His Red Reels of Albanian Agitprop

Ed Rampell Hollywood Progressive
For almost two decades before 1939, Alfredo Cecchetti worked as a cameraman documenting the rise of the Fascist Party in Italy and its leader Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Alfredo C. helped to immortalize the great machine of the Italian Fascist Regime – both in Italy covering countless public appearances of Mussolini and after 1939, the Italian invasion of Albania, as he followed the Italian troops and then filmed the new Italian settlers. Embedded in the archive are many films that were part of the Italian Fascist propaganda machine.

poetry

Power of Poetry

Amy Meier Veterans of life Write
California poet Amy Meier wrote this poem in memory of Jacob George, a veteran of 3 tours in Afghanistan whose postwar “moral injury” led him to suicide.
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