Nicole Seymour is fed up with sanctimoniousness, with judgment, and ...
Essays
Virtual Roundtable on Fairness in College Admissions
The college admissions scandal exposed criminal and unethical actions that undermine the promise of the American university system. To get ...
“We Forgot Our Names”
“Most of the time, they changed your name into a number—they called you ABC1, ABC2,” explains Hani Abdile about the time she spent interned in one of Australia’s notorious immigration detention camps ...
Oliverio Girondo’s “Superwords”
“Animalevolent.” That’s the word that transfixed me some two decades ago. It’s a portmanteau that I discovered when reading Eliot Weinberger’s translation ...
Bake, Britannia
Eighteen years ago, in Borneo, Kelly Wiglesworth told a camera crew that she didn’t come to make friends, she came to win. This iconic moment from Survivor defined much of the nearly two decades of reality TV that would follow ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ACLA 2019
This year’s annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association gathered at Georgetown University. Participants met in small ...
Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter ...
Sinkholes and Saviors
Few writers would dare to pick as the title of a collection of 11 short stories the name of a state that is home to 21 million people, more than a million alligators, countless snakes, and a few ...
Inside and Out in Paris and France
A year ago I was a recent college grad living in Toulouse, in southern France. My generous host family ...
Whose England? Whose Brexit?
A subplot running through Jonathan Coe’s most recent novel, Middle England, involves a feud between two garish children’s clowns that culminates in a ...
B-Sides: Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution”
While hard at work on his 1954 Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell ...
Guns Made the State, and the State Made Guns
Industrialist and philanthropist, lobbyist and cultural leader: Samuel Galton Jr. was in 1795 a prominent member of Birmingham’s bourgeoisie. He was also ...
Tabloid War, Class War
Respectability is overrated. Or so said Gawker, the influential, controversial, and luridly entertaining news and gossip site that was forced to close in 2016. Covering stories that other media ...
How Did Humanism Die? How Did It Survive?
In 2019, the idea of “humanism” feels passé. If humanism means “universally shared values,” or “progress,” or an exceptionalism based on the power of ...
On Christopher Street Pier
This month, Public Books mourns the loss of the writer, teacher, and editor Ellis Avery to leiomyosarcoma, a rare uterine cancer. Ellis’s essay about a beloved ...
On Our Nightstands: February 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Bearing Risks and Being Watched
If two features define contemporary capitalism, they are first the tendency of each individual to increasingly bear alone the risks associated with living in a ...
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ...
Dancing Queer Children
Fans of Dance Moms and of RuPaul’s Drag Race alike rejoiced when Netflix debuted Dancing Queen this past fall. As Abby Lee Miller—the Dance Moms teacher and queen of my heart—frequently and ...
Turkey’s “Ghost Empire”
A Turkish academic I once met in a provincial Anatolian city insisted to me that Turkey is a country where a lot goes unsaid, a place where much is buried, and where fairy tales are told to hide a ...
