“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” ...
Essays
Let Us Now Praise Corporate “Persons”
When presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend” during a 2011 campaign appearance at the Iowa State ...
The Posthuman Enlightenment
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these ...
Raise Your Needles: In Defence of Public Knitting
It was a triumph bagging the last table on the busy rooftop bar, especially so late ...
B-Sides: Gene Stratton-Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost”
All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century ...
Giving Credit to White Supremacy
Something, we are told, has changed in capitalism. Finance has replaced production as the main source of wealth; credit matters more than profit; even the ...
Novels of Colombia’s Patriarchy
Fathers dead and fathers dying—as well as adult children struggling to leave their fathers’ shadow—shape two recent novels from Colombia. Though one concerns a ...
Migration and the Remains of US Empire
The way we talk about history matters. And this is especially true in the case of the Philippines, which, in many ways, served as a laboratory for America’s imperial ...
Internet Dystopias after Trump
Fitting chaos into form is what genre was made for. But what does it mean for our literature—let alone our society—when reality suddenly turns wolfishly against ...
Ray Bradbury on War, Recycling, and Artificial Intelligence
One of the roles of science fiction is to provide readers with a glimpse of how ...
Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall
Isaac Asimov loved large numbers. He was born a century ago this month, and when he died, in 1992, he was both the most famous science fiction writer in the ...
Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of ...
What Future for Magic Mushrooms?
Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been used for centuries by numerous indigenous peoples around the world. These fungi appear in Aztec statues (like the one ...
Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen ...
Quizzical: What Essential Part of an Academic Conference Are You?
Here at Public Books, we embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly of an ...
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...
Understanding Race with AI
Racial categories are, by definition, unequal categories. They reflect not universal truths but historical processes that have linked racial status to ...
Ferrante’s Storytelling in a Global Age
Today Europa Editions publishes Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, by Italy’s foremost Ferrante scholar, Tiziana de Rogatis. Key Words takes the acclaimed Neapolitan ...
Decolonization Requires a New Economics
On October 15, 1968, the government of Jamaica banned a 26-year-old history professor from reentering the island nation. Walter Rodney, a lecturer at the ...
The Book of Faces
I’m not actually sure if I should call Jessica Helfand’s Face: A Visual Odyssey a book. I mean, it looks like a book. It has text, divided into sentences, paragraphs, and sections. It’s on pages ...
