Games like Wordle and CALL OF DUTY equally stem from capital's attempt to conquer leisure time. Is there a better way to play?
Essays
When Medusa Meets #MeToo
Greek mythology has long been a by-word for elitism. Is it really a good idea to use its images for contemporary gender justice?
A Novel the CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress
Mr. President shows widespread corruption around a fictional Guatemalan dictator. This did not please the country’s real dictators.
More Than Hearts and Minds?
Armageddon Time is undercut by the very forces it hopes to expose: white complicity, forged through the exploitation of Black life.
Natalia Molina on “A Place at the Nayarit”
Writing Latinos is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.
Protesters of the World, Unite
Individual protests, like those in Hong Kong, may be defeated. But the global protest movement is only beginning.
Cracks in the Louvre Abu Dhabi
The museum has made its splash, but if it wants to be more than a work of starchitecture, it requires deeper collections and bolder curatorial vision.
“Maybe it wasn’t a Narrative at All”: Three Poetry Collections
The best poets tend to trouble conventions, including those they find necessary.
Franzen’s Anger
“Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset.”
Tender Gossip: Darryl Pinckney’s “Come Back in September”
Is there a writing life than can safely dispense with categories like identity and commitment, which count so much in how we live now?
Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now
Mexico once cultivated a “special relationship” with death. But cultural globalization and rising violence is weakening that bond.
On Our Nightstands: February 2023
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Armenia: Another Century, Another Genocide?
From the start of Armenia’s independence in 1991, Turkey took a hostile position toward its erstwhile victim of genocide. That hostility remains.
Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
Now the Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”
The world’s humanists might just be the new MVPs in the struggle for the future of critical thinking.
Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
Leon Forrest: “Make a Way Out of No Way”
"He regarded with skepticism and clarity the temptations to make racial identity the foundation of our humanity."
Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 250
How to interpret Coleridge’s voluminous patchwork of triumphs, fragments, stolen snippets, and unrealized plans? Does any larger pattern emerge?
All Futures Are Possible
“It is fanciful to invest too much faith in the isolated act of reading – the stimulated, inspired or entertained brain does not store carbon.”
“To Convey Love Through Sound”: A Jazz Musician’s Comeback in the Aftermath of a Hate Crime
“All I could do those days was stay in bed because my head was spinning from the painkillers."