What does it take to get to college graduation? The question becomes more urgent as college tuitions rise and education debt accumulates, even though baccalaureate completion remains a baseline ...
Essays
Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the ...
“Down the Rabbit Hole of America”: Katha Pollitt Talks with Susan Jane Gilman
Susan Jane Gilman is a storyteller with a lot to say—about life in our unequal and bewildering America, about refugees, about what happens to youthful ambition ...
White Men—and the Monsters Who Love Them
Even if you’ve never seen the CW’s long-running show Supernatural, you’ve seen Supernatural. Reaction GIFs of the lead actors screaming, crying, and hugging ...
Translation and Other Children: Liberaki’s “Three Summers”
While metaphors linking translation to human reproduction abound, Karen ...
A Manifesto for the World as One Finds It
Animals have been disappearing for the past two centuries: first from our everyday lives, in the era of urbanization and industrialization, and then, as the sixth ...
A Just Future for Cycling?
I occupy three precarious categories: South Florida resident, humanities professor, and cyclist. The last, however, is a condition afforded to me because of ...
B-Sides: Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”
John Ashbery said he was nice—“nice as a person and nice as an artist.” I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have a rich critical vocabulary for nice artists. (And how ...
Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Ego and the Id”
Freud’s ideas have long been absorbed by popular culture, but what role do they continue to play in the academy, in the ...
“Euphoric” Heroes
“I know your generation relied on flowers and fathers’ permission,” says Rue, the protagonist of HBO’s Euphoria, “but it’s 2019, and unless you’re Amish, nudes are the currency of love, so stop shaming ...
On Our Nightstands: September 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 ...
The South According to Coetzee
Readers waiting expectantly for the third novel in J. M. Coetzee’s late trilogy, following The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, were in for a ...
Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront ...
Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art ...
Bleached Atmospheres of Dread
Myles McRae MLA was a monster of male entitlement. Any person who read the Australian newspapers in the year 1891 would have thought so. Six feet tall ...
Quizzical: Which Psychoanalytic Literary Term Are You?
Some literary theorists fawn over Freud, others love Lacan, while others still ...
Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the ...
How Can Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform Coexist?
Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects ...
Resisting the Rhetoric of Disaster
Ever since the Arab world achieved political independence, its great hopes for self-determination and freedom have been built up and razed down several times ...
