Boston Review Magazine Jan-Feb 2015 Back Issue

Boston Review turns forty this year. In a world filled with endless temptations to produce bullshit, we take pride in having resisted those temptations. Independent and not for profit, we are in the business of fostering serious discussion of important public issues. That is the kind of discussion that democracy depends on.

Our mission is crystallized in our signature feature, a forum that models democratic deliberation. In this issue Glenn Loury (Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University) leads the debate on the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the subsequent protests about racial injustice. Loury appreciates how tragedies such as this can galvanize activism. But he fears that focusing on instances of police violence against black men straitjackets the pursuit of equality to the facts of particular cases, generates politically toxic resentment of police, obscures the realities of violence within African American communities, and distracts from persistent, structural problems of poverty and racial inequality.

Responses to Loury take him to task for not considering seriously enough the deep history and pervasive pattern of police violence against people of color, or the function of police violence in sustaining racial subordination. But all agree that the injustices are innumerable and that the fight for racial justice is long.

Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, and elsewhere in the issue you will find illuminating exploration of important ones. Steven Shapin considers whether scientific inquiry, with its commitment to the truth, is especially virtuous; Samuel Moyn dissects the idea that liberalism originates in Christianity; Amy Dean profiles AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka; and Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig argues that feminists championing affirmative consent legislation have not fully understood the implications of such rules for how we think about sex and intimacy.