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The way I remember things, I bought my copy of The Game in a Waterstones bookstore on Oxford Street, sometime in 2008—the same year Yang wrote his essay—and I didn’t feel wonderful doing it. I was embarrassed, for a start. Buying the book seemed like solid evidence of inadequacy as well as being fa…

“I’m still confused,” a girl said one day. What she was confused about was all the other cops besides Burge who had tortured. “How did they not go to jail?”

Douglas gave a tight smile, the smile of a person trying not to give in to the unpleasantness of the news they had to deliver. “You expect …

The next day, the class watched footage of Kitchen himself, filmed after he was released from jail but before he won his settlement. Someone off-camera asks him to describe his post-release life. Kitchen tells them he hardly sleeps. That the mere sight of a Chicago police car sends him into a full-…

A Theory of Justice was a kind of palimpsest

Salih had become a Marxist as a teenager because she could not accept that the world was “a place of boundless suffering.” “The militant,” she wrote, “is someone who responds to a form of collective awareness. He steps into the movement for the sake of correcting the ever-crooked balance between tr…