Boston Review

@bostonreview.bsky.social

A magazine of ideas, politics, and culture, committed to the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

Independent & nonprofit since 1975.

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@smellosopher.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

"In the unruly space of the psyche, she teaches us, the ordinary and the horrific are dynamically bound, pushing and intruding on each other. This takes particular forms at certain points in history, when you cannot unknow certain violences."

@theresaheyd.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

große Empfehlung, ein Text, der lustige Passagen hat (tomato soup cake) und gegen Ende eine Wendung nimmt, die man mit offenem Mund und Taschentuch in der Hand liest

@glavey.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

Drop what you are doing and read this incredible essay by @kristingrogan.bsky.social on the question of whether we can handle what Sylvia Plath shows us in her poems. It's brilliant and fierce and up to the job in a way that not many other writers could manage.

@mrfahrenheit.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

Freed from the constraints of international law, the Board of Peace can neatly align its plans with a longtime Trump family interest: real estate development.

@bostonreview.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

“One wonders whether Ayn Rand, who as a young woman in the thirties wrote fan letters to Mencken like he was Clark Gable, ever knew that her idol once brought his pen to the aid of Sacco and Vanzetti and Eugene Debs, or that he corresponded affectionately with Emma Goldman.”

@lromeranth.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

Much to my dismay, this piece of mine from last year has held up pretty well: www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ri...

In past rounds of moral panics on campus, when “cancel culture” and “trigger warnings” were still the threats du jour, pundits and social media outrage peddlers converged to frame campus protests at large as threats to “free speech.” Responding to the steady churn of outrage-bait framing protesting students as “snowflakes” and “crybullies,” state legislatures across the country passed a flurry of “campus free speech” bills drafted by right-wing think tanks, which expanded the range of anti-protest measures available to college administrators. To be sure, boycotts and deplatforming protests were useful props in these efforts. Still, what made it possible to inflate deplatforming incidents into threats that required expansion of repressive state power was the failure to question a securitized vision of liberty that, since Bush’s “they hate our freedoms” speech, has become increasingly dominant.
Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social

After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

In other professors’ syllabi, the bot flagged the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, essays by the Mexican American MacArthur genius grant recipient Sandra Cisneros, and materials related to a class about the Holocaust (that professor was told to drop material regarding Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people). Putting aside the ideological slant of the new rules, the bot, like many large language models, seems to “hallucinate,” or make mistakes. The AAUP lawsuit lists texts banned for their “sex-based ecofeminist framework” and “gendered ecofeminist frameworks.” These phrases might sound persuasively like academese, but the academics behind the lawsuit had never heard of them; these concepts “do not exist,” the complaint says. Matthew Pehl, a history professor at Tech, told me that he knew several people who’d received reports from the system that were “plainly written by an AI that had hallucinated content or confused content from one class to another.”
@bostonreview.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

“Shorter books sometimes seduce and caress you. Their coyness and wit delight; their ironies kink your kink. You linger longer than you should and you know it but they seem to be written just for you. This too is observation, not complaint.”

@markbould.bsky.social on China Miéville:

@nfariousactivities.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

——————
“Several aspects of the Board stand out…its absolute illegality…its imposition of what a legal expert calls an ‘illegal trusteeship‘ over Gaza; its likely function as another failed enterprise for the Trump dynasty to launder & make money.”

Drop Site interview w/ author: tinyurl.com/kcapvt4x

@bostonreview.bsky.socialReposted by @bostonreview.bsky.social

“A mental pentathlete.” That’s how Joyelle McSweeney describes the genre-defying Canadian writer Anne Carson—the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the subject of several BR essays, and a contributor to the magazine herself:

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