Category
Interviews
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The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life
Avi Shlaim, historian and influential scholar of Israel’s relationship with the Arab world, joins John Plotz and Yuval Evri to discuss class, caste differences, and destructive ethno-nationalist ideologies in mainstream Israeli politics.
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“Being Undocumented Is Already a Chronic Stress. Then, Add in Blackness”: Talking with Dr. Felecia Russell on the Experience of Black Undocumented Folks
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“Our Guns Make the Violence That People Are Fleeing”: Ieva Jusionyte on Guns & Violence in Mexico
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“She Seems So Normal to Me”: Cassandra Neyenesch on Writing a Woman on the Verge
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Adventures Newly Narrated: Jessica Francis Kane on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Lost Adventure
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“If a Woman Commanded Fire”: Talking Historical Stoves and Affordable Energy with Joyce Chaplin
“The idea that better indoor heating could be invented that would make an entire room warm was really astonishing.”
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“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins
How do the families and friends of those struggling with addiction perceive that addiction, cope with it, and try (or fail) to love that person anyway?
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The Wonderful Capacities of Other Animals
“As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds have vivid dreams, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination.” —Charles Darwin, Descent of Man Darwin’s evolutionary theory did more than establish a corporeal commonality between species; it also raised hard questions about commonalities of consciousness. David Peña-Guzmán, cohost of…
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“As Good As It Gets”: Talking Liberalism with Kevin Schultz
“Up until Franklin Delano Roosevelt, very few Americans actually called themselves liberals or embraced anything that was called ‘liberalism.’”
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“Is Kahane Becoming Normalized?”: Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane’s Zionist Radicalism
“For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews … was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism.”
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“We Want You to Leave Home”: Crystal Sanders on Black Southerners and “Segregation Scholarships”
“I began to realize that the state of North Carolina was paying for Black students to go north as a way of preserving segregation. These were what I call ‘segregation scholarships’ to study elsewhere.”
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“These Cycles Are Repeating Themselves”: Lara Norgaard on Indonesian History and Translating Political Fiction
“Even characters with completely benign intentions or mildly selfish intentions end up doing pretty bad things because of the institutional structures around them.”
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The “Emotional Economy” of Parenting: A Conversation with Nina Bandelj
“I am an observer of how intellectual ideas travel and enter into everyday life, or how they come to be performed by families in ways that give those ideas a reality of their own.”
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“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”: Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism
“I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society.”
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“I use the story to do the thinking”: Ann Leckie on Writing “Radiant Star”
“Panicking never helps. Building a new model of how things work (in your mind, and in the world) is going to take time and will be the result of many small, inglorious acts.”
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Eating Disorders Are More Than a Feminist Issue: A Conversation with Amber Husain
“What they refuse to consider is that neuroses concerning food might be driven by meaningful factors beyond pressures on vanity (assumed to be feminine).”
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“Wrapped in the Spiral”: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo on Creation and Collaboration
Passage of the Spiral (2024) is a film with hazy and indistinct parameters, earning its designation of “pseudo-documentary.” Who is acting, and who is “real”? Which of the many stories being told or represented is true? The film shirks the rigidity of borders—between reality and fiction, between geographies, and between who is permitted to be…
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“The Interdisciplinary Nature of Food Is Now Un-ignorable”: Alicia Kennedy on Food Writing, Food Security, and Food Justice
“Food writing can no longer just be ‘go to this restaurant’ or ‘explain this dish or cocktail.’”
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“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
“This way of going about prophecy sadly replaces the historical fact of Black victory with a timeless failed rebellion. Too bleak, if you ask me.”
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We Are the Authors of the Story of Citizenship: Daisy Hernández on America’s Myth
“I hope that readers will take it upon themselves to think and feel like they are also the authors of the story of citizenship.”
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“Disaster Has Happened and Is Happening”: Tara Menon on What the Novel Reveals
“I wanted to propose grief as perhaps the most appropriate response we can have to what is happening to the natural world—the disappearance of coral reefs in the Andaman Sea and bird habitats in New York.”
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“Recover, Replant, Return”: Talking Nuclear History, Writing, and Food with Kate Brown
“Were people in the past like me, did they feel like they were in some historic maelstrom? If they did, how did they scrape by?”
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“To Wither in the Same Way We Shall”: Talking Archives, Diseases, and History with Edna Bonhomme
“The progressive and leftist organizers that I knew before think about three things: educate, organize and agitate. And that could apply to the public health students and public health people.”
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Defending the Possibility of the University: A Roundtable on “University Keywords”
“What would it look like for faculty unions and graduate student unions to collaborate or work together with K-12 teachers’ unions to push back against anti-DEI legislation or book bans?”
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At the Edge of Erasure: An Interview with Anouche Kunth, Historian of Exile
In the basement of a French administration office there was a mass of 12,000 documents related to the refugees of the Armenian genocide, telling a terse story of loss.
