As we pass the 70th anniversary of Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, his message ...
Essays
Masculinity on the Mat
From Ready Player One to Roseanne, popular culture in 2018 might be looked back on as “problematic,” to use a polite academic term, in its attempts to bottle and sell 1980s nostalgia. Conservative in both form and content ...
America Learns What Russia Knew
How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information ...
India’s Youth: Small Chances, Big Dreams
The first time someone recommended Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World to me, I rolled my eyes at the title. I wondered ...
@X: Making America White 200 Years Ago
In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans gathered in Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia ...
Birth of a Queer Parent
By virtue of their youth, trans and queer kids offer something new. Coming out today is less exclusively a narrative of young adulthood or middle age, and increasingly an experience of childhood or ...
The World of Asian American Studies
Last summer marked a watershed of sorts. Crazy Rich Asians became one of the most successful romantic comedies ever, grossing over $165 million in the US ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...
On Our Nightstands: January 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 Pinsetter’s Lament
What makes humans human? What distinguishes us from the machines we design to perform our tasks, machines we admire for their elegant mimicry, then resent and fear? If a compelling case ...
Casa Mueller’s Ghost: Displaced Afro-Caribbean History in Panama City
I’m standing on a foot-wide cement island in the middle of the bustling Avenida ...
“Hopelessness Makes Possible a New Hope”
Though it’s more than a hundred miles from the coast, during the early evening of October 29, 2012, my apartment in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had the salty ...
Free Speech and Equality on Campus
Every day at one of the over four thousand colleges and universities in the United States, some eager individual is denied the opportunity to speak to college students ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at MLA 2019
This year’s MLA convention in Chicago, Illinois, was a suspiciously pleasant affair: clear weather, somewhat navigable conference spaces, and proximity to ...
Toward an Ecological Cinema
In France, a recent legislative bill identified the task of bringing about “corporate transformation” as one of the major challenges of the 21st century ...
Ending the Anthropocene
One might think that the patent anthropocentrism of the concept of “Anthropocene” would suffice to invite a clear opposition, and, yet ...
Corporate Responsibility in the Climate Crisis
In France, a recent legislative bill identified the task of bringing about “corporate transformation” as one of the major challenges of the 21st century ...
The Bingewatch: Lesbian Drama
Why do I, and so many others, still stan for “The L Word,” despite its failure to enact a perfectly calibrated representation of queer life?
B-Sides: Satomi Myodo’s “Journey in Search of the Way”
As spiritual autobiographies go, Journey in Search of the Way is a bit of a romp ...
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...