Allegations about the fabled author’s uncle and his potential transgressions renew questions about how much an author’s personal experiences matter when we evaluate their work.
Category Archive: Uncategorized
Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus shows us the horror of being young and gay in an evil small town with extravagant flair.
Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, an ethnic Mexican adolescent observed Chicanos at a family gathering sporting brown berets, black Ray-Ban sunglasses, and beatnik-styled goatees.
We need ways to reach a better understanding of what’s happened, what is now, and what could be.
I lost someone this week that I loved so dearly. I am bereft. In all the years that we’ve been doing Tropics of Meta, I have never felt this hurt.
Emily Dufton’s Addiction, Inc: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, explores the arc of treatment for opioid addiction from the late 1960s to the present, arguing that, briefly during the early 1970s, the federal government provided real treatment for addicts.
Hello, folks — Festivus greetings to all our sweeties and babies who have followed this blog and our work for the last 16 years.
The piece opens with voice notes exchanged with my cousin in Tehran, my childhood best friend unseen for 27 years, as internet servers fall under shutdown and cyberattack, and moves outward: into the Persian concept of ghorbat, the open-ended strangeness of exile; into the false binary Western media has imposed between supporting foreign intervention and tolerating the Islamic Republic’s repression; and into a genealogy of American and Israeli interference that has historically destroyed the very conditions for democratic flourishing.