About this site

The Critical Realist is an independent publication launched in September 2025, featuring monthly dispatches on politics, culture, and society by Dr. Michael Gould-Wartofsky.

Dr. Gould-Wartofsky is an acclaimed writer and scholar who studies power, resistance, and state-society relations in 21st-century America. He holds a BA in Government from Harvard and a PhD in Sociology from New York University. From 2023 to 2025, he was the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Center for Political Economy at Columbia University.

Dr. Gould-Wartofsky is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement (Oxford 2015) and the forthcoming Resistance: Field Notes from the Frontlines, 2016-2025. He has written for The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Forward, Gizmodo, Jacobin, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Newsweek, among others.