Evans’ FBI file is held in a federal facility hundreds of miles from Cleveland, and digitized scans of its components are not available online, making it difficult for the city’s residents to discover for themselves the scope of illegal surveillance their community faced.

As a midwesterner, my life has been saturated with Alberta’s oil. My first car, a used Ford F-150 with a bench seat stained brown from the plumber who owned it before me, had dual fuel tanks that held over thirty gallons of gasoline. Much of that gas came from Alberta oil.

Ishchenko argues that the burden of the post-Soviet left is debatably its greatest asset: that people remember how it felt to be part of communism’s utopian project, and that before today’s war, a strong plurality of Ukrainians felt ambivalent about, not hostile to, its cause.

The material conditions that underpinned social democracy have disappeared. Against this backdrop, left populism constitutes a sincere, but plaintive, desire for the lost world to return. 

Merchant demonstrates that to act as a Luddite is to be anything but out-of-touch: it is to mobilize a common sentiment that marches from the past, and to stride as part of a collective toward a more equitable future.

Power doesn’t always come from brute force; in many cases it operates through obfuscation and mystification. Illuminating all of this is the easy part, of course. The challenge is figuring out how to empower the people who work under these conditions.

Slobodian reveals that dreams of elite dominion have drawn on fantastical, even magical, thinking. They’re predicated upon chaos and apocalyptic anxieties, both as preconditions for the reconfiguration of the world according to narrow, private interests and as drivers of paranoid self-seeking.

The moment of prognostication has long since passed, and the speculative remaking of American geography by a changing climate is no longer so speculative.

For Kenn Thomas, the Midwest periphery was a perfect vantage point for keeping track of D.C., Roswell, Langley, and the rest.

I say “region” and not “the South” because the regional borders are porous, not just in those liminal zones that separate the South from Appalachia and Appalachia from the Midwest, but in our national self-conception as well.

It's not like you're going to convince decision-makers and they're going to make the right decision for you. It really is a question of forces, not men, which is the sort of line I hammer on throughout the whole book. Which means our response to it needs to be about forces, not men. 

Forget the Cayman Islands. Picture instead the rundown Huntington building in Cleveland's downtown skyline and an abandoned steel plant in Warren, Ohio.

Through intimate narratives, McKenzie profiles the legacies and acculturation experiences of seven third-generation American siblings, the first Wongs to grow up in Beloit.

Official remedies for the present polycrisis are often couched in market principles. In excavating the troubled history of libertarian exit, though, we can at least better understand what we are up against.

Donald Trump, who won Ohio handily in both 2016 and 2020, tapped into a primal element of the American spirit.