Category
Essays
-
Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
-
To Reach Beyond Ourselves Is Key to Our Survival
“We wanted to make a book that began to answer the questions Muriel Rukeyser asked. We wanted to make a book that continued to ask the questions she asked, of ourselves, of each other.”
-
France’s Art Museums Remain Silent on Haiti
“It wasn’t that we expected an exhibition on Charles X’s coronation to be turned into an exhibition on the double debt. But we did expect the show to complicate the narrative around France’s last king.”
-
Solo el pueblo: Migrant Justice Against Fascism in the Americas
Thanks to the politics of sanctuary and abolition, the multiracial city is, perhaps, challenging authoritarian power, even as liberal democratic institutions have faltered utterly against the rise of right wing, white ethnonationalism.
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Secret Evidence
“Immigration law is a zone of exception where many American constitutional standards, the supposed safeguards against government abuse, simply do not extend.”
-
The Double Edge of Border Security: 30 Years of Expanding Executive Power through Immigration Law
In the 1990s, lawmakers—including Schumer, Biden, and Clinton—invoked civil rights ideals, even while they narrowed legal protections from detention, deportation, and policing.
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Criminalizing Black Migrants
“These two laws are inseparable. Together, they form a ‘prison-to-deportation pipeline’ that subjects Black migrants to a ‘double jeopardy’ of systemic racism.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Breaking Welfare
“Today, as the Minnesota case shows, the welfare state is being turned into an instrument of mass deportation … Meanwhile, the specter of welfare usage is being used to bar the door to citizenship.”
-
Republicans Debate Amnesty
“Being undocumented during my formative years … meant that I always lived with fear,” recalls Alberto Ledesma. “I thought that any misstep I took could endanger [my] entire family.” An artist and writer, Ledesma is one of the approximately 2.7 million formerly undocumented immigrants who were able to adjust their status because of the Immigration…
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Destroying Families
“Women—who disproportionately carry the burden of caregiving and are often left alone when partners are kidnapped—are pushed into deeper poverty and isolation.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 100 Years of Murdering Migrant Workers
“The KKK’s terror campaign took a bloody toll. Between 1917 and 1920, 170 IWW union organizers were lynched or murdered in extra-judicial killings.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: A US Infrastructure Decades in the Making
“Immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today, because it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
-
Style Guide: An Open Letter to the Editor of T Magazine
We here at Public Books are not averse to receiving homage; far from it. In fact we are proud of “B-Sides” and feel it deserves its readership. Let a thousand literary reevaluations bloom, we say!
-
What Literature Did Agents Build?
For three days in August 2022, the publishing world directed its attention not to Manhattan, but to Washington, DC, where the industry stood trial. Penguin Random House had attempted to acquire Simon & Schuster, a move that would reduce the “Big Five” publishers to just the Big Four. Viacom had been signaling their desire to…
-
The Shape of Ménage à Trois to Come
“However much desire there is for the threesome to maintain its stability, the cultural force of homogenous marriage is strong.”
-
Who Gets Guggenheims?
Unfortunately, 100 years of data show that those whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—that is, those not at elite institutions—are least likely to receive them.
-
Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2025 or MLA 2026?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2025 and which was overheard at MLA 2026?
-
Arendt Speaks of Oases
Arendt sees the oasis as a way to save our self-understanding from the psychological cry of adjustment as well as the totalitarian demand for conformity.
-
The Waiting Is the Point: Time, Suffering, and Medicaid
“To be poor and sick in America is to live in delay. The Medicaid system does not just reflect that reality—it enforces it.”
-
They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout
As the entire country was plunged into a digital blackout, the only light remaining in my room was the cold, clinical glow of my disconnected laptop. There, in that forced isolation, I sat translating a story about death.
-
AI=B+
“The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”
