Essays Archive | Los Angeles Review of Books

All Essays

The New Normative: Queer Politics in “The Outs”
"The Outs" is an example of what will hopefully, eventually, one day be commonplace: it’s a show featuring gay characters that isn’t about being gay.
John ShermanMay 17, 2016
- Television
Game of Thrones: Season 6, "Book of the Stranger"
"I'm With Her"
Aaron Bady, Sarah MesleMay 16, 2016
- Dear Television
Mike Nichols’s Disappearing Act
"Becoming Mike Nichols" feels like part of a posthumous retrospective that attempts to return to Nichols the critical plaudits that greeted his early career
Manuel BetancourtMay 15, 2016
- Film
The Short Corridor: How the Most Isolated Prisoners in America Took on the System, and Won
An essay on prison reform in California’s penitentiaries
Alessandro CamonMay 15, 2016
- Law
- Politics
Rousseau’s State of Pure Nature
Althusser’s reading of Rousseau takes us to the very heart of questions on the management of our natural world in the age of the Anthropocene.
Jason Barker, Louis AlthusserMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
Althusser’s Philosophical Disorder
“Philosophy,” as Althusser writes, “is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.”
Jason BarkerMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
Rain in the Gallery
Althusser, late in his life, wrote about rain.
Dariush M. DoustMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
Althusser: The Law, The Cop, and The Subject
How does the law shape who we are and how we behave?
Nina PowerMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
Reimagining the Subject: Althusser and Spinoza
The contemporary materialist philosopher must endeavor to think practically and in the absence of conditions, begin with nothing.
Caroline WilliamsMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
Marxist Underground
Is it an accident that the “aleatory” content of Althusser’s materialism came increasingly to the fore after 1968?
Richard SeymourMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
The Ideology of Localism
Localism has become more popular as the world’s social and ecological crises mount.
Greg SharzerMay 15, 2016
- Philosophy & Religion
In Search of the Great Hollywood Novel
Hollywood novels let us see the past, not in long-shot, with the gulf of time separating us from the events they describe, but in brilliant close-up
Graham DaselerMay 14, 2016
- Fiction
The American West: A Collective Denial
Watkins raises the question: “What does a book about the West mean now?” Most stories we think of as Westerns have ignored the region’s defining tragedies.
Noah Gallagher ShannonMay 11, 2016
- History
Beyond Resistance: Towards a Future History of Digital Humanities
In “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives),” Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia have produced a timely and trenchant critique.
Andrew Piper, Juliana Spahr, Richard SoMay 11, 2016
- Cultural Studies
Trump and the End Times
All these years, Jack Van Impe has been preaching a certain truth. It took Trump to make it revelation
Dan SinykinMay 9, 2016
- Politics
Swaying in the Crosswind
The women’s movement in Palestine is hard to assess, not only because of ambiguous metrics, but because many other struggles so often overshadow it
Helen MackreathMay 8, 2016
- Around the World