Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
Essays
How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University
The promise of a diverse university and a just world is too precious to give up on.
Mother Courage
The summer I turned 17, in the springboard pause between high school and university, I began working as a nurse aide in the geriatric rest home and hospital run by my mother.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
Emily Dickinson, “The Greatest Freak of Them All”?
Does viewing Emily Dickinson as unusual actually help us understand the poet or her work better?
What “PEN15” Has Joined Let No Man Tear Asunder
While today’s female-friendship narratives celebrate the central bond, they are mainly about the art of breaking up.
Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
Distant TV
If television is giving you something right now, what might it be telling you about what you need?
B-Sides: Louis Bromfield’s “Pleasant Valley”
“What I wanted was a piece of land which I could love passionately, which I could spend the rest of my life in cultivating.”
The Enduring City: Jakarta, Indonesia
In the parts of the city left behind is a Jakarta free from the globalized sameness of so many of the world’s megacities.
Black Poetry after Beyoncé
How do black feminist artists negotiate their own work in the wake of commercial success beyond contemporary poetry’s wildest dreams?
What Can Big Data Teach Us about Eviction?
Big data shows that those fighting eviction today need not be constrained by today’s ideas or laws of property.
Transforming Teaching amid the Coronavirus
Even though most professors are forced to value research over teaching, many are excellent teachers. It’s time to honor that skill.
A Man in Brussels
Storytelling about the European Union tends to be done by those aggressively disinterested in its survival. Isn’t that a problem?
On Our Nightstands: April 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
More Mobility, More Problems
A philosopher examines how upwardly mobile students might thrive, and why they often will not.
Distant Sports
Stories—with video!—of some of the most memorable, gut-wrenching, or downright remarkable moments in sports history over the past 40 years.
Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
