On May 11 Title 42 finally expired. The public health order, issued by the Trump administration in March 2020, almost completely shut down asylum processing at our southern border; in the last three years the US has conducted approximately 2.8 million expulsions of migrants, regardless of their reasons for trying to enter the country. The ..read more

In December 2021 unions won two victories that have significantly reshaped the American labor movement in the years since: Starbucks Workers United unionized the first store in the company’s history, and the NLRB ruled that organizers be allowed into the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. By early 2022, two enormous corporations that had been considered ..read more

In September 1969 Susan Taubes returned to Budapest, the city where she had lived until the age of eleven. Standing outside her childhood home amid the bustle of the late-afternoon rush hour—the veranda bright with plants, the bushes still filled with berries, the wrought-iron gate closed—Taubes was overcome by a feeling of “beauty and grief ..read more

How did countercultures commune before the Internet? One quaint and underappreciated precursor to the information highway was the underground press that proliferated during the late 1960s. The medium was never more the message. Sprouting in cities and college towns across America, these rambunctious weekly or biweekly tabloids flourished for a half dozen years, a form ..read more

Just to the east of the City of London is the district called Spitalfields. It was always a place of exile. Once the habitat of Huguenot weavers fleeing the massacres in France, it later became a refuge for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia. By the 1970s it had acquired a new population of ..read more

“Lygia Pape: Tecelares” at the Art Institute of Chicago is an endlessly surprising exhibition, lyrical, frisky, and stealthily profound—which is a lot to pack into a bunch of mostly black-and-white polygons and circles. An important figure in Brazilian postwar art, Pape, like her fellow travelers Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, began her career dedicated to ..read more

A public memorial requires, at minimum, a shared memory—a consensus that something significant happened, if not necessarily what that something meant. The best monuments of remembrance, in fact, are those that inspirit collective emotion while accommodating disparate interpretations. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., evinces patriotic pride for some, renews rage for others. Yet ..read more

Last weekend the NYR Online published “Wages for Housewives,” an essay by the scholar and critic Anna Shechtman on the reality TV series The Real Housewives. The title alludes to the work of the Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici, who in 1974 argued that women’s housework under capitalism was always “destined to be unwaged.” What ..read more

Paris in November. The rain was unrelenting, people huddled in cafés, and umbrellas knocked heads in the cramped streets. Scooters, bikes, and buses zoomed by, spattering muddy water with little regard for pedestrians. Everything felt taxing—even the metro was a mess. The only people engaged with life at a normal speed were those with dogs ..read more

The interiors of Andy Warhol’s Factory, at 231 East 47th Street, were famously all silver: silver foil on the walls, silver paint on the pipes and ducts and furniture, mirrors everywhere. Even the elevator was silver. The intention of Warhol and his decorator, the photographer and Factory acolyte Billy Name, was to create an environment ..read more