Responses to the idea of a “post-racial” society usually follow a certain script. In most progressive circles in the US, the notion is dismissed as fantasy or delusion. In southern Africa, and ...
Essays
QUIZZICAL: Which Academic Jargon Term Are You?
You may deploy academic jargon in your quotidian routines, but let’s take your praxis a step further. Which literary theoretical term do you embody?
A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about ...
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
Against Human Capital
My parents were on the brink of retirement at the same time as I was researching pension strategies in Israel. So, I couldn’t help thinking about them whenever retirees were discussed. It made things ...
Phenomenal Pleasure: Women and the Game
Watching the early minutes of the first match of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament, I was surprised to find myself tearing up ...
Cute. Dangerous. Asian American. “Gremlins” @35
Gremlins—released 35 years ago this summer—is about a cute, furry ...
B-Sides: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s “My Uncle Napoleon”
In the central courtyard, in the middle of a family party, in mid-century Tehran, a fart rings out. Or was it a fart? A cat? A cat’s fart? The sound of a chair being ...
When Did Nature Become Moral?
When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations ...
The Book That Made Me: An Animal
The Lives of Animals was the first book I read in college—or at least the first book I read in a strange, amazing seminar that rewired my brain in the first semester ...
Women Who Write About Their Feelings and Lives
Two recent memoirs by women who grew up in “sexually liberated” 1970s artistic Australia present a sobering picture: of predatory and violent men whose ...
On Our Nightstands: June 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 ...
What Were the Women of “Thrones”?
There’s something attractive about watching Game of Thrones’ labyrinthine drama unfold in a world where stone, wood, and steel reign supreme. Amid ...
Authorship After AI
Authorship attribution is helpful if you suspect fraud: for instance, if you believe that Shakespeare wasn’t educated enough to write the plays, or that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was really ...
Impossible Belonging
If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than ...
AI: Machines or Magic?
AI has always only partially been about the actual future of probable developments and base-rate outcomes; it has also been singularly productive of philosophical speculation, fantasy, and arguments about ourselves and the future ...
Machine Learning Is a Co-opting Machine
We are using human activity as an example from which to learn, and that becomes the basis upon which we then develop automated solutions to all sorts of ...
Letting Go of Technochauvinism
In my talk for the Co-Opting AI series, I spoke about my book, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, which looks ...
Co-Opting AI
Today, almost 70 years after Alan Turing famously asked, “Can machines think?,” what we call “artificial intelligence,” or AI, has seemingly come to penetrate our everyday life. It is in our phones ...
QUIZZICAL: Famous Writers, and Their Pets!
Behind many celebrated writers is a canine, feline, reptilian, or avian pal. Do you know the domestic creatures that have kept these novelists, playwrights, poets ...
