Book Reviews
L.A. Doesn’t Have a Homelessness Crisis. It’s a Crisis of Abandonment, The New Republic (April 12, 2024)
Review of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, by Neil Gong (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels, by Pamela Prickett & Stefan Timmermans (Crown, 2024).
The Socialist Moment Hasn't Passed. It's Yet to Come, The New Republic (February 6, 2024)
Review of The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics, by Joshua Green (Penguin Press, 2024).
Big Publishing Killed the Author, The New Republic (November 15, 2023)
Review of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, by Dan Sinykin (Columbia University Press, 2023).
The Right Uses College Campuses as Its Training Grounds, Jacobin (August 17, 2023)
Review of Resistance From the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America, by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
Where Does the South Begin?, The New Republic (June 26, 2023)
Review of A New History of the American South, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
Blame Palo Alto, The New Republic (February 6, 2023)
Review of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown, 2023)
The Story of Palm Oil Is a Story About Capitalism, Jacobin (January 19, 2023)
Review of Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, by Max Haiven (Pluto, 2022).
The Problem with Silent Spring Environmentalism, The New Republic (January 10, 2023)
Review of Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening, by Douglas Brinkley (Harper, 2022).
Dire Straits, New York Review of Books (June 23, 2022)
Review of Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, by Josiah Rector (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
What History’s “Bad Gays” Can Tell Us About the Queer Past and Present, L.A. Review of Books (June 3, 2022)
Review of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, by Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller (Verso, 2022).
DDT Is Still With Us, 50 Years Since It Was Banned, The New Republic (May 31, 2022)
Review of How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT, by Elena Conis (Bold Type Books, 2022).
Rikers Island Has Made Us All Prisoners, Jacobin (May 27, 2022)
Review of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, by Jarrod Shanahan (Verso, 2022).
The Political Imagination of Stacey Abrams, The New Republic (June 10, 2021)
Review of While Justice Sleeps: A Novel, by Stacey Abrams (Doubleday, 2021).
Sex Work as (Anti)Work: On Heather Berg’s “Porn Work,” L.A. Review of Books (June 7, 2021)
Review of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, by Heather Berg (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
Despite Everything, Queer Leftists Survived, Jacobin (June 5, 2021)
Review of Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, by Aaron S. Lecklider (University of California Press, 2021).
A Rust Belt City’s New Working Class, The New Republic (March 31, 2021)
Review of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, by Gabriel Winant (Harvard University Press 2021).
Lauren Oyler Is a Tough Critic of Contemporary Fiction. Can Her Novel Do Better?, The New Republic (February 11, 2021)
Review of Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler (Catapult 2021).
Sabotage Can Be Done Softly, L.A. Review of Books (January 5, 2021)
Review of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, by Andreas Malm (Verso 2021).
A Mission to Expose Far-Right Hate, The New Republic (October 28, 2020)
Review of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, by Talia Lavin (Hachette 2020).
The Generation That Was Exhausted, The New Republic (September 18, 2020)
Review of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, by Anne Helen Petersen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2020).
Bending Toward the Storm, L.A. Review of Books (July 10, 2020)
Review of Katrina: A History, 1915-2015, by Andy Horowitz (Harvard University Press 2020).
Big Questions in Microhistory, Journal of Women’s History (Summer 2020)
Joint book review of Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, by Karen L. Cox (University of North Carolina Press 2017); Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America, by Kali Nicole Gross (Oxford University Press 2016); The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era, by Michael A. Ross (Oxford University Press 2015).
The Lives of the Left Behind, Boston Review (April 17, 2020)
Review of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, by Josh Levin (Little Brown 2019).
Don’t Look for Patient Zeros, The New Republic (April 8, 2020)
Review of Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, by Richard A. McKay (University of Chicago Press 2017).
How Far Left Should a Millennial Be?, The New Republic (February 27, 2020)
Review of Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History, by Malcolm Harris (Melville House 2020).
How Powerful Is This Right-Wing Shadow Network?, The New Republic (February 19, 2020)
Review of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, by Anne Nelson (Bloomsbury 2019).
The Lives of the Left Behind, The New Republic (December 3, 2019)
Review of Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, by William D. Lopez (Johns Hopkins University Press 2019).
The Making of a White Supremacist Myth, The New Republic (October 24, 2019)
Review of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, by Kevin M. Levin (University of North Carolina Press 2019).
How War Made the Cigarette, The New Republic (September 25, 2019)
Review of The Cigarette: A Political History, by Sarah Milov (Harvard University Press 2019).
The Forgotten Women of Abolitionism, Chicago Review of Books (September 5, 2019)
Joint book review of Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier, by Lea VanderVelde (Oxford University Press 2010); The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, by Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz (Cornell University Press 2013); and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster 2018).
Appalachia Strikes Back, Times Literary Supplement (May 28, 2019)
Review of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to “Hillbilly Elegy,” edited by Anthony Harkins & Meredith McCarroll (WVU Press 2019).