As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
Essays
Public Books Database
The Public Books Database is collecting the resources being offered for free by academic presses during the COVID-19 crisis.
India’s Fans and India’s Future
Obsession is one of the hallmarks of love in Indian cinema: specifically, a love that breaks down borders.
B-Sides: Graham Greene’s “Stamboul Train”
Strangers share a 1932 train ride from Belgium to Istanbul, a journey that reveals the dark changes already sweeping the continent.
The Myth of the “Sixties”
When we mythologize the ’60s, we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us.
On Our Nightstands: March 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
The Kleist We Need
Heinrich von Kleist teaches how to resist heteronormativity, as well as how to imagine gender fluidity and a less restrictive masculinity.
Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
Babe Ruth’s New York @100
Ruth embodied a new and yet very old phenomenon—celebrity—in a technological era poised to capitalize on him.
Read Feminist Manifestos!
Early manifestos honored a high-stakes feminist anger that swept through the writing. It burns and simmers even today.
Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence.
College Worth Fighting For
Professors are in a class struggle, a real fight that cannot be won with critique alone.
Nancy Hale, at Last
Hale's stories reveal that the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night.
When’s the Beef?
In Terry Bisson’s 1991 sci-fi story, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” two characters discuss alien life-forms that have been attempting to make contact with their species. The conversation returns again ...
Deep Focus: “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming”
It’s hardly a secret, but, for a land that bills itself as a land of freedom and ...
Make Allies, Break Empires
“Do you want to join the army, or do you want to go to jail?” This question—typically posed by a judge to a teenager charged with a petty crime—animated ...
Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman
Before our eyes, US Latinx writers are inventing a new form of the novel. The classic bildungsroman, or novel of education and development, typically ...
A Culinary Golden Age—but for Whom?
In the 17th century, nostalgia was considered a disease. Today, nostalgia has shifted from an individual illness to a collective malaise. It is now often ...
B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath ...
