Coming of age in the 1980s, Lucy Sante cut her teeth on a downtown scene haunted by the likes of Kathy Acker and Tom Verlaine. She wrote for publications like The New York Review of Books and penned works on topics from the anarchic history of Paris to the reservoirs of upstate New York. In 2021, after a long life as a man, she announced that she was transitioning to being a woman—an experience that is now the subject of her new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. Documenting the solitude and solidarity that came from transitioning, the book, Stepahnie Burt writes in her essay about it for Books & the Arts, also “describes an aspect of existence common to her generation of trans people and so to mine, too: We often felt that we grew up profoundly alone.” Less formal and research-driven than her past books, I Heard Her Call My Name, Burt argues, is also more intimate, more personal, and more forthcoming: It describes the feelings of being “too old, too settled, too busy, and perhaps too cautious” when it comes to finding one’s place in trans culture. It also shows Sante, who was born in Belgium, finding a new kind of home. “Sante has moved—immigrated, if you like—from the cumulative, self-concealing, recorded details that made her famous for writing about lives other than hers, into a brighter land of openness about her body and her desires. It’s a good place to settle; it may even—to judge by my own life—feel like coming home.” Read “Lucy Sante and the Solitude and Solidarity of Transitioning”
“Born out of lower- and middle-class…angst in the United States and England,” Marc Bayard writes, Punk has always been “at its core…about fighting social norms…and promoting individual expression.” The musical movement is now more than six decades old, and it is easy to forget this wild and rebellious spirit after years and years of its commercialization. “For this very reason, punk remains a fragile experiment even today. Despite its often lofty aims, it is still subject to the stereotypes and prejudices that society heaps on other minority communities.” Writing about his own experiences as well as a new book devoted to Black punk culture, Bayard also considers what it was like to be not just Black and a punk but a Black punk. “While mainstream culture often sees punk as primarily a musical phenomenon,” Bayard writes, it was a social one too, and being a Black punk meant being not only part of “a subculture within a subculture” but outside of the mainstream in two senses as well. For Bayard, this is why Black punk culture has always been “an incubator for radical ideas and forms of expression of which music is only one small (though loud) sliver.” “Punk, at its best,” Bayard concludes, has always been more than “a lifestyle but a life. Not a perfect one, of course, but one that incorporates myriad elements (including music) into a cultural phenomenon that allows for and, in fact, demands the free expression that shatters many preconceived stereotypes and prejudices.” Read “Black Punk Means Liberation”
A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells us not only the story of the United Farm Workers but also how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.
Branko Milanović’s century-spanning intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.
Set between the 16th and 22nd centuries, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a work of political comedy, fixated on class, climate, food, wine, and the afterlife.
