Energy companies promise to “go green.” Yet they use the same forms of extractive capitalism that have destroyed the planet’s climate.
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Pandemic Syllabus
Disease has never been merely a biological phenomenon. Instead, all illnesses—including COVID-19—are social problems for humans to solve.
Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
Public Thinker: Virginia Eubanks on Digital Surveillance and People Power
What’s in a Name?
Stanley Lieberson wrestled with the problem of causation throughout his prodigious research career, but nowhere more ingeniously than in A Matter of Taste.
Reading Black Futures
Digitizing works of fiction by Black writers catalyzes history, so that it can build new futures.
Can a Novel Be Silent?
John Cage's concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
Listen to the Birds
Avian flu came from environmental devastation, an increasingly interconnected world, and a growing population—just like COVID-19.
B-Sides: Mary Butts’s “Armed with Madness”
The author’s pagan obsessions, like her chatty metacritiques of other modernist writers, set her apart from her contemporaries.
Minimal Success
In art, it is often said, less is more. The same may also be true for criticism.
On Our Nightstands: June 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Naomi Oreskes: Feminist Science Is Better Science
“Science is stronger if the community is diverse. And recent history supports that.”
Tele-visionary Blackness
Black folks can call into being an alternative relationship to TV, one that prompts a shift in consciousness and just possibly alters the future.
Ideas Alone Won’t Tame Capital
Inequality emerged after the French Revolution, and again after the postwar boom, because our institutions have been hardwired to serve capital.
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
Democracy, More or Less
What future does democracy have? What future should it have? And, moreover, can the problems of democracy be solved within the framework of democratic politics?
Pencil Leaners
The collective ventures of the Federal Writers’ Project force us to think about how writing might be reinvented in the context of economic crisis.
The Floating Park: Parc de Belleville, Paris
“It is rare, on a summer evening in Paris, to find this sort of quiet along with the sensation of having the city at your feet.”
Toward a Cellular Humanities
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis?
