What Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me by Claudine Gay

The New York Times got played by right-wing muckrakers. The most important newspaper in the country drastically over-covered the ginned up controversies around Claudine Gay, which led directly to her resignation as the president of Harvard University. It’s the coldest of comfort that Gay is offered the chance to respond on the publication’s editorial page. The warnings she issues in this piece deserve to be heeded by all. The continued empowerment of radical conservatives, whose regressive viewpoints are given disproportionate primacy in the broader cultural discourse, is doing untold damage to the nation and all its institutions. This is simply one example.

A Sleater-Kinney Album Mutated by Grief by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib does a fine job contextualizing Sleater-Kinney and the current state of their art in this piece for The New Yorker, paying particular attention to the way personal tragedy intervened in their creative process. I didn’t really need an adrenaline shot to my enthusiasm for their forthcoming album, Little Rope, but here it is anyway.