Tag: new book
What Does It Mean to Be Latino?
For the writer Héctor Tobar, latinidad, which means something like “Latino-ness,” or the condition of being Latino, is both sweeping and particular: It encompasses all those who identify as Latino and at the same time nods to the fact that each Latino experience is highly individual. In his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, Tobar writes that Latinos “have crossed oceans and deserts, and entered into new and
The Influencer Industry Is Having an Existential Crisis
Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid
Who Lives in America’s ‘Empty, Forgotten Places’?
In the many decades that have passed since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books became the most widely read, most beloved account of the American frontier experience, a revisionist view has emerged, not just of what these days is called settler colonialism but of her father, Charles—that is, Pa, the fiddler with the twinkling eyes.
As portrayed by Wilder’s biographer Caroline Fraser, Charles Ingalls was a feckless man, if a loving father. He dragged his wife
Review: ‘The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family’
“Our family, Black and white.” For the slaveholding class of the old South, it was a familiar trope, one intended to convey both mastery and benevolence, to hide the reality of raw power and exploitation behind an ideology of paternalistic concern and natural racial hierarchy. There was profound irony in the white South’s choice of this image, for the words were far from simply figurative: They revealed the very truths they were designed to hide. One can see in the
Gordon Sondland, The Only Ambivalent-About-Trump Pundit
From 2017 to 2021, a string of businessmen with long, lucrative careers entered government service and left with their reputations tarnished. Rex Tillerson was a world-bestriding CEO who found himself hated by both his new boss and his new employees. Steven Mnuchin, a successful though largely anonymous moneyman, developed an image as a sloppy supervillain. President Donald Trump was arguably the paragon of the class, transforming himself from a famous personality to an infamous threat to democracy.
Gordon Sondland was
How Wellness Became a Grind
Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and transport yourself mentally back in time to the year 2013. The actor and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow is making an appearance on The Dr. Oz Show to promote some “all-natural tricks to revitalizing your body from the inside out.” Paltrow has four things to recommend: daikon radish (“it’s got really high enzyme content”), oil of oregano (for colds), magnesium supplements (“they say it really calms the nervous system”), and colloidal silver, a
How Should Feminists Have Sex Now?
When the activist and writer Ellen Willis published “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” in 1982, the preposition in her title underscored an uncomfortable truth: The sexual revolution had come and (mostly) gone and left women largely unsatisfied. On the one hand, the ’60s and ’70s had ushered in real, tangible gains. Contraception and abortion had been legalized; the stigmas surrounding casual and extramarital sex had lessened. For women, there weren’t as many punishments for daring to have sex as
What the Labor Movement Can Learn From Its Past
Essential, fed up, in demand: These are terms often used to describe American workers in the COVID era. Companies have laid off millions of people; the coronavirus has killed many others. Panicked employers have scrambled to raise wages and offer perks in response to the “Great Resignation.” More than 100,000 workers either striked or threatened to during October 2021, which some dubbed #striketober.
Throughout the pandemic, Kim Kelly, a labor journalist and organizer, has reported on
Don’t Pin the Patriarchy on the Apes
One morning in January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space. No human had yet been where he was headed. At the time of Ham’s foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of
The Most Haunting Truth of Parenthood
Do we ever really understand our parents? Certainly not when we’re children. If we’re lucky, we begin to understand them later. We might one day realize, for example, that they carried burdens we couldn’t see. Sometimes I wonder if I might have learned something important about what was to come in adulthood had I been paying closer attention when I was little, but no, I couldn’t have related then. It is only in recent years, when the most maddening, haunting