Looking for Utopia, Alone
A passionate search for America’s utopian communes inadvertently reveals what’s wrong with building enclaves of progress cut off from the real world.
27 Articles by: Marianela D’Aprile
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Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Where Exactly Is Ling Ma Trying to Take Us in Bliss Montage?
Ling Ma’s new short story collection, Bliss Montage, leads us down strange, stimulating paths — and then leaves us before we can fully gather our bearings.
In Avalon, Nell Zink’s Characters — and Her Readers — Have Nowhere to Hide
In novelist Nell Zink’s new book, Avalon, we might not recognize her characters’ circumstances, but we might recognize ourselves in their near-feral stupidity.
The Public Transit Solution That Never Was
The Alden StaRRcar was a noble but failed attempt to combine the virtues of public and private transport.
Living in the First Draft
Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour is a novel for our time of uncertainty.
Palaces of Lost Promise
Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum is German neoliberalism in one building — retrograde, pompous, and built on the ruins of socialist modernism.
In HBO’s Sex and the City Reboot, the Thrill Is Gone
At its best, the original Sex and the City took the romantic lives of its characters seriously while presenting them hilariously. But its reboot, And Just Like That…, has sucked all the fun out of its stories.
Composer Stephen Sondheim Wasn’t Interested in Treacly Optimism or False Heroes
No lyricist and composer treated their audience more like adults — capable of wrestling with the ambiguities and tragedies of life, without needing big, dumb heroes or happy endings — than Stephen Sondheim.
The Architecture of Prisons Is Everywhere We Look
Buildings’ design communicates the values of a society. In contemporary American architecture, those values appear closer to control and surveillance than openness and enjoyment for all.
In Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Love Leaps Over All Obstacles
In Beautiful World, Where Are You, the biggest obstacles aren’t material. They’re the barriers to connection and love the protagonists put in their own way.
Annette Fascinates but Doesn’t Convince
Leos Carax’s Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is audacious. But the film thwarts its own truth-telling ambitions by refusing to put its characters’ inner turmoils in dialogue with anything but themselves.
Jessica Hopper Rescues Music From the Forces Sucking the Life Out of It
Music gives tangible shape to the best and basest in all of us. Yet under capitalism, it’s just another commodity. That artists and critics continue making and writing about music despite the industry’s vampiric drive for profit shows our stubborn unwillingness to give up a key piece of our humanity.
Nora Ephron Wrote Through It
I love Nora Ephron. The world needs more Nora Ephrons. There are potential Noras all around us — they, and we, deserve a society that supports and nourishes and encourages them.
Chicago’s Thompson Center Is a Palace for the People
Downtown Chicago’s wonderfully futuristic, bizarre Thompson Center integrates government, business, public art, affordable eating, and public protest space — and it’s currently in danger of demolition. The Thompson Center must be preserved; its architectural spirit is too interesting — and the public space it provides too exceptional — to discard.
For Women, a World of Better Sex Is Possible
In her new book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel insists on a basic point: changing the kind of bad and damaging sex that women all too often have in a sexist society can’t fall solely on individual women.
The New Amazon Headquarters Is Butt-Ugly. That’s Because It’s Not for Us.
Most new architecture, like Amazon’s proposed new HQ, is hideous. That’s because it is made for corporations. Despite all the mistakes and brutalities of the Soviet experiment, at least their architecture was designed to serve the people instead.
Delete Your Fake Account
In her new novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a bleak portrait of a social media–addled world saturated with loneliness and alienation. It’s incredibly accurate. But there must be a way out of the nightmarish social landscape she depicts.
Don’t Hate the Dolly, Hate the Game
A collective wail of anguish went up after news broke that Dolly Parton’s working-class anthem “9 to 5” has been repurposed for a Squarespace ad lauding “working, working, working.” Our grief is justified. But the song’s deformation into a hollow jingle says more about capitalism than Dolly.
9to5 Brought Women Into Labor and Working-Class Women Into the Women’s Movement
Karen Nussbaum was a cofounder of the pioneering labor-feminist organization 9to5. In an interview with Jacobin, she discusses why working women in the 1970s needed to organize as workers, 9to5’s hilarious tactics, and why “individually self-reliant but collectively powerless” women workers today still need to organize on the job.
The Labor Feminism of 9to5 Should Guide Our Organizing Today
For today’s feminists, labor militants, and socialists, the vision of feminist labor organizing that guided the women’s white-collar organizing project 9to5 — and immortalized in the classic comedy 9 to 5 starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton — should still be our north star.