The humanities have a replication crisis of monumental proportions: so many theories have never been adequately tested or validated.
Essays
Tolerance by Accident, Trust by Design
Today, trade and globalization often reinforce the incentives for coercion and violence. But what might the history of India reveal about the economic conditions of toleration?
Don’t Listen to Morals, Listen to Vegetables
Making food joyful—even while educating on food insecurity—is a tall order for a children’s show. But Waffles + Mochi is a show like no other.
Seek, Memory …
If memory is an unreliable narrator, how can it be the medium through which we arrive at the truth about ourselves?
The Future Is Not a Solution
How might we learn resilience, care and community in the face of crisis–climate, political, cultural, economic or otherwise?
Necessary Housework: Dismantling the Master’s House
White supremacy tells us we do not belong, but we do have a place in history.
B-Sides: John Keene’s “Annotations”
Annotations isn’t a book you read for the plot. It’s more of a “Notes toward...” that remains just that: always towards, never quite arriving.
Freedom Education
An educated public grew out of freedom, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed. And education was also freedom’s surest protector.
Nuclear Noir
At its core, noir is a feeling: realizing one’s own helplessness, when faced with the vast networks of power that control everyday life.
On Our Nightstands: September 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
France and the Question of Consent
Two memoirs trenchantly critique the ways in which France has framed sexual consent, legally and culturally, since the 1970s.
Lyn Hejinian’s “Allegorical Activism”
The revelrous, rebellious writing of Hejinian—arguably our foremost poet-critic—works against our sense of psychological and political isolation.
How College Teaching Can Have a Future
Do we want a university built around managers and cops, or around students and their teachers?
To Read against Ferrante—or alongside Her?
Despite using a pseudonym, Ferrante has made clear how readers should understand her work. Should critics listen?
Skateboarding, We Hardly Knew You
Since its beginnings, skateboarding has always been multicultural—and always provided ways to resist rigid US norms and borders.
Art and Culture in Schorske’s Century
With decades of creativity—that ended with World War I—Vienna jolted Western art and culture forward into high modernity. But how?
The Planet Needs Collective Action—not Tech
Digital tech cannot stop climate change merely by “greening” individual consumption.
How to Read like a Translator
To work as a translator is to encounter a text with an active desire in mind, a desire that both constitutes and modifies the way that text is experienced.
The World Latinx Athletes Make
Latinx athletes have forged new identities, cultivated community, and anchored themselves in spaces that were not created for them.
The Netanya-who?s: Gossip and Other Kinds of History
Benzion Netanyahu—father of the former prime minister—is not the protagonist; rather, it is his scholarship and the practice of history itself.