Category
Essays
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Retro Gaming: It’s Not Nostalgia, It’s Resistance
“If we want to resist the enshittified paradigms around us, we can’t just shake a fist at the sky: We have to show them a better way.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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…
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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.”
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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.”
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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.’”
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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!
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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…
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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.”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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AI=B+
“The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”
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“No Future” Lexicon: Nothingness
Beyond the existential and metaphysical anxiety it provokes, nothingness also constitutes an ontological opening: it compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos.
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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The Misuses of the University
Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?
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XOXO, Ricardo Ortiz (1961–2025)
To hear him speak was to feel how literature can still shape a life; how beauty, thought, and feeling can move us forward together.
