John Cage's concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
Essays
Listen to the Birds
Avian flu came from environmental devastation, an increasingly interconnected world, and a growing population—just like COVID-19.
B-Sides: Mary Butts’s “Armed with Madness”
The author’s pagan obsessions, like her chatty metacritiques of other modernist writers, set her apart from her contemporaries.
Minimal Success
In art, it is often said, less is more. The same may also be true for criticism.
On Our Nightstands: June 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Tele-visionary Blackness
Black folks can call into being an alternative relationship to TV, one that prompts a shift in consciousness and just possibly alters the future.
Ideas Alone Won’t Tame Capital
Inequality emerged after the French Revolution, and again after the postwar boom, because our institutions have been hardwired to serve capital.
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
Democracy, More or Less
What future does democracy have? What future should it have? And, moreover, can the problems of democracy be solved within the framework of democratic politics?
Pencil Leaners
The collective ventures of the Federal Writers’ Project force us to think about how writing might be reinvented in the context of economic crisis.
The Floating Park: Parc de Belleville, Paris
“It is rare, on a summer evening in Paris, to find this sort of quiet along with the sensation of having the city at your feet.”
Toward a Cellular Humanities
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis?
Women’s Ways of Aging
Studying human evolution reveals that older women have always been essential to the surviving and thriving of the species.
Tales from the Crypto
Techno-utopians rarely acknowledge that untraceable money transfers support a world of kleptocrats, tax havens, and dark-money politics.
Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
From the Archive: Police Brutality
In solidarity with the ongoing actions against police brutality, we return to previous work by our authors on the relationship between policing, poverty, capitalism, liberation, and racial justice ...
Is Retirement Retired?
Instead of a recognition of a life devoted to a single firm, pensions are now the source of strife between management and workers.
Making Therapy Work for Asian Americans
How does one negotiate the truth within a network of Western racist stereotypes that pathologize the East, alongside equally Western ideas about “insanities”?
Mend Your Ways
An exhibition of Japanese textiles celebrates repaired clothing: flipping salvage into sustainability, and damage into beauty.
