MAGA Jesus at the Capitol
February 21, 2022
The language of religion, for a moment, made the mob into a team.
Guernica
A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics
Politics
Interview
Interview
Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt: “You see the politics on her face”
October 25, 2021
Revealing a more personal side of the renowned philosopher, in the archives and on Twitter.
Report
Nihilism, Optimism, and the Noble Cause
March 17, 2021
Reporting from the 2021 Georgia runoffs means understanding what’s real.
Interview
A Monumental Shift
March 15, 2021
A group of artists and creative technologists wield augmented reality to insert women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ icons into the landscape of public memory.
Essay
Mourn and Organize
February 25, 2021
Faced with so much loss, we need space not simply for coping, but for mobilizing against the forces that allow such losses to happen.
Satire
Things to Answer For
February 15, 2021
In America, white ladies really can have it all, if “all” is criminal charges plus a vacation.
Report
How to Wash Your Hands in a War Zone
January 26, 2021
Colombia was finally beginning to identify the bodies of people who disappeared in atrocities of its 50-year civil war. Then came the pandemic, and now the government can bury everything and everyone who bears witness to too much truth.
Essay
Lost for Words
January 15, 2021
It’s impossible to agree to disagree with someone when there is no mutually agreed upon reality.
Essay
In the Land of Fiction and Fake News
January 15, 2021
A lie is a fiction made up to take away someone else’s power.
Essay
Jason the Heat Guy
January 11, 2021
The heat guy considers what to do with us, the frozen lesbians on the little dead-end street. If God cut off our heat, who is he to intervene?
Fiction
My Fellow Americans
November 25, 2020
I am gruff. I’m mediocre. I’m not good at getting what I mean into what I say. Mostly, I’m tired. The same lines, the same debates. Different stages. I’ve been dragged across too much of this country and I know it’s not getting better.
Fiction
Mrs. Bhat’s Kashmiri Fish Dinner
November 13, 2020
"I swear by my entire family, I am just a woman, not a fidayee, I will show you what is in the basket,” Mrs. Bhat pleaded, her face swollen with crying.
Essay
If They’re Losing, Who’s Winning?
November 4, 2020
I have gotten older and bigger and certainly no less Black in the years since I first heard Chris Rock’s diagnosis of this problem.
Interview
Talia Lavin: Into the Abyss
November 3, 2020
The journalist discusses her new book on the history and nature of white supremacy in the digital age.
Report
No Justice, No Peace
June 12, 2020
Voices from two weeks of Black Lives Matter protests in New York.
Commentary
The Future in Catastrophic Times
May 20, 2020
As we navigate life during COVID-19, science doesn't have all the answers. But queer theory might.
Essay
The Optimist’s Apocalypse
March 30, 2020
What if the world can “end,” as your life has many times—and then begin again?
Essay
From Environmental Crisis to Pandemic, Waging a War with Nature
March 17, 2020
What the 19th century American pragmatist William James can teach us in the age of coronavirus.
Report
Out of Sight
March 16, 2020
Hope sustains the migrants living in a camp in Matamoros, Mexico, but everything is tainted by despair.
Interview
Meaghan Winter: Progressives Can’t Give Up on the States
March 16, 2020
The political journalist on the timidity of liberal foundations, the peril of ignoring local reporting, and whether organizers have succeeded where party politics has failed.
Commentary
Recognizing Blackness in Chile
March 2, 2020
How the rise of the #Chiledespertó movement has created space to discuss the country’s whitewashed constitution.
Commentary
Anatomy of a Successful Campus Talk
December 10, 2019
The real threat to free speech on campus isn't what you think.
Report
The Border Merchant
November 6, 2019
On the remote border between Afghanistan and Iran, an enigmatic smuggler makes a living selling hope.
Interview
Dina Nayeri: The Craft of Writing the Truth about Refugees
November 5, 2019
The writer discusses the complexity of migrants' lives in a world that demands their simplicity.
Essay
Bint el-Balad
August 6, 2019
A journalist reflects on the difficulty of maintaining professional boundaries while covering the Syrian refugee crisis
Interview
Viet Thanh Nguyen: Writing to Re-member
June 17, 2019
The author discusses the refugee crisis, US foreign policy, and the problem of ‘narrative scarcity’ for marginalized and minority populations.
Essay
Death of a Dream
February 19, 2019
As demographics shift, Latinos in Texas are claiming the majority and seeing themselves in the center of the national story.
Essay
The Alamo is a Rupture
February 19, 2019
It’s time to reckon with the true history of the mythologized Texas landmark—and the racism and imperialism it represents.
Essay
“The Best Kind of People”: Shifting Definitions of Citizenship and the Making of Arizona
February 19, 2019
For a century, Anglos from cold corners of the country have been lured here by the promise that this was a place where they could live among their own, in communities with nary a brown person in sight.
Essay
The Lucky Ones
February 19, 2019
I told her we were brought over the Rio Grande on a raft. I never called it a smuggling.
EssayPhotography
A Visit to the Border
November 19, 2018
A trip to the border—and the bridge that connects Brownsville, Texas with Matamoros, Mexico—remembered in words in images.
Interview
Marie Brenner: Public Stories and Private Wars
November 8, 2018
The investigative journalist discusses her outspoken father, a notorious encounter with Donald Trump, and the legacy of an impassioned late colleague
News
Ballots and Bloodshed: The Militarization of Local Politics in South Africa
September 4, 2018
Political violence in the province of KwaZulu-Natal reveals a bloody history still haunting the country’s democracy.
Report
A State of Captivity: Immigrants Detained Repeatedly for Old Crimes
June 22, 2018
At a moment when compassion for the immigrant is already limited, the immigrant criminal is rarely on the receiving end of it. Yet it is inhumane to punish people multiple times for the same crime.
Report
Among Catalan Winemakers, Separatism Uncorked
June 7, 2018
Conflicted over independence from the central government, Catalonia's organic winemakers see their work as deeply tied to national identity.
Comics
The Father of Three Bracing for Deportation
April 4, 2018
Felix Garcia, a Guatemalan immigrant, is scheduled to be deported today. This is his story.
Report
What Does the Obama Center Owe Chicago?
March 19, 2018
On the South Side, a monument to the former president’s legacy becomes a contest over the terms of gentrification.
Interview
Elizabeth Catte: Appalachia Isn’t Trump Country
March 7, 2018
The historian on J.D. Vance, colonial logic, and the end of coal in the region that outsiders love to imagine but can’t seem to understand.
Interview
Kate Manne: The Shock Collar That Is Misogyny
February 7, 2018
A philosopher rethinks what’s keeping women down.
Essay
My Mother’s Secret Ballot
January 29, 2018
She and I both grew up near Detroit. How could she vote for Trump?
Essay
The Consequences of El Salvador’s Abortion Ban
January 11, 2018
A cautionary tale of how criminalization impacts women across class lines.
Interview
Eli Valley: Let the Horror Speak for Itself
January 4, 2018
The cartoonist on taking back Judaism and the role of satire in America today.
AudioPoetry
The last dog in the world
November 15, 2017
What are days? Just him and / the left-over spiders.
Commentary
Universities’ Reliance on Contingent Faculty Endangers Free Speech on Campus
September 22, 2017
When universities rely heavily on contingent labor, they do more than reduce their own bottom lines.
Interview
Suzy Hansen: The Rest of the World Knows
September 7, 2017
The writer on living abroad in Istanbul and the fraught concepts of American innocence and empire.
Interview
Mirjana Karanović: After Yugoslavia
August 21, 2017
The Serbian actress and filmmaker on legacies of violence in the Balkans and letting go of secrets.
Essay
Semiotic Weapons
August 7, 2017
What Roland Barthes taught me about decoding the NRA's recent controversial ad.
Interview
Mithkal Alzghair: Dancing Displacement
July 25, 2017
The Syrian choreographer on his latest performance.
Interview
Sara Ahmed: Notes from a Feminist Killjoy
July 17, 2017
The feminist scholar on bridging theory and ordinary life, and the pervasive myth that feminism originated in white culture.
Report
The Mountain and the Dry Desert Are Mine
June 12, 2017
The contentious effort to transform a remote Pakistani town into the epicenter of the new world order.
Essay
Waiting for Bill
June 5, 2017
Scenes from Senator Bill Cassidy’s town-hall meeting, Metairie, Louisiana, February 22, 2017.
Commentary
The Lamentable Tragedy of Stephen K. Bannon
May 15, 2017
On Steve Bannon's adaptation of Shakespeare's bloodiest play.
Comics
Under the Water
May 4, 2017
A comic about baptism, the rising seas, and the end of the world.
Lives
Out of the Iron Closet
March 20, 2017
In search of acceptance, a gay Russian man seeks asylum in the United States.
Interview
Elif Batuman: Speaking Different Languages
March 13, 2017
The writer on her new novel and the many systems—linguistic, technological, cultural—that we use to speak with one another in life and literature.
Interview
Kameelah Rasheed: Who Will Survive in America?
March 6, 2017
The visual artist on “the stutter” in history, strategic opacity, and Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter.
Commentary
Sharing Seats
February 6, 2017
"Airplane armrests are never a simple matter of neutral ground."
Essay
“Build That Wall!”: A Local History
January 2, 2017
The boy was killed in Nogales, where the border fence curves over hilly desert like a weird spine.
Commentary
Indulge the Other
November 8, 2016
As the US votes, reflecting on Glenn Beck's glory days, the pursuit of power, and a burn-it-all-down approach to American government.
Commentary
The Forbes 100
November 7, 2016
Support letters to Sheila and Michael Forbes in their fight against Donald Trump, Balmedie, Scotland.
Profile
The Clown and the Caliphate
November 3, 2016
Encounters with a man so bizarre ISIS wouldn't keep him.
Commentary
Trumpworld
October 21, 2016
Billed as an aberration, Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is anything but.
Interview
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami: Mirror from Damascus
September 22, 2016
In a war that remains unfinished, two Syrian-British writers acknowledge and affirm those whose stories and lives may be lost in its course.
Commentary
Donald Trump and Freshman Essays
September 13, 2016
On the value of uncertainty—in college essays and American politics.
Commentary
The Mystery Box
August 31, 2016
The artist Jonathan Horowitz takes on presidential politics, again.
Commentary
The Racial Dynamics of Justice—When Life Imitates Art
August 18, 2016
Reading the OJ Simpson trial through a novelistic lens.
Commentary
The Vanity of Crowds
August 16, 2016
Shakespeare warned against treating democracy as a popularity contest.
Interview
Jose Orduña: A Good Deal of Light
August 16, 2016
Jose Orduna on asserting personhood as resistance, the connection between activism and essays, and being 'aggressively bilingual'
Report
Behind the Hostage Detention of Bangladeshi Tahmid Hasib Khan
August 5, 2016
Even as Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka gets back to normalcy after a deadly siege a month ago, Bangladesh wrestles with the rising specter of extremism.
Report
To Give Memory a Place
July 18, 2016
Pieter Hugo's latest portrait series examines the quiet afterlives of apartheid and genocide.
Commentary
“The Internationale,” Anecdotally
July 14, 2016
On Music: The perfect song to sing in times of uprising, at Occupy Wall Street, or before a Seder dinner—and always en masse.
Fiction
Three Strikes
July 1, 2016
Commentary
Chasing Transparency
July 1, 2016
Discretionary policy on immigration has largely operated behind closed doors,something experts have long questioned.
Commentary
Morning in Machine Gun America
June 30, 2016
Exploring American gun culture and the thin line between fact and fiction.
Commentary
The Brexit Delusion
June 29, 2016
A British expatriate reflects on the country's "Leave" vote.
Commentary
Donald Trump, Illusion of Convenience
June 16, 2016
The acclaimed Mexican writer explains why Donald Trump is a welcome distraction for the government of Mexico.
Essay
Rich Eyes and Poor Hands
June 15, 2016
The Future of Cities: In the aftermath of the most recent attacks in Paris, the writer considers a city wavering between gravity and light.
Commentary
Cities of the Future: The White Center
June 15, 2016
While neighborhoods are being redeveloped, their histories are being used to advertise their future. History has become a marketing tool. Make use of the past and create the future with it: this is familiar for a country whose national ideology is built on an endless cycle of self-invention.
Commentary
Cities of the Future: I Didn’t Leave My Heart in Beijing
June 15, 2016
The future of Beijing? That depends on the many currents running through the political seas of the country, and the world around it. Will it be the capital of the last communist country on earth? Will it be the capital of the wealthiest capitalist economy? Will some semblance of its former beauty return?