Category
Essays
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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.”
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Taimani Alley, Kabul
Winters, before the paving of the neighborhood streets, when rain and snowmelt gathered in long puddles, or froze into broad ruts of broken ice and slush, the alley was a shortcut …
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The Church House on Cannaday School Road: Floyd, VA
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Floyd, VA, sits at the intersection of State Highway 221 and Route 8, in the southwest point of the state. The sole stoplight in Floyd County guards that intersection, watching over the courthouse, an unadorned 20th-century clump of…
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Commuter Lit: How to Do an MFA on the MTA
When I moved to New York three years ago, to start graduate school at Columbia University, I took pains to rationalize my decision to live in Brooklyn—rather than, say, Morningside Heights or Washington Heights or Harlem or, really, anywhere in the relative vicinity of campus. I would be studying in the nonfiction MFA program and…
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Urban Park Poetics: Summer in Marcus Garvey Park
For city dwellers, summer is park season. Warm weather draws people out of their homes, onto the streets, and, if they’re lucky, into a nearby park to enjoy recreation of all kinds (eating, napping, fishing, swimming, texting, Pokémon catching, furtive sex, sunbathing, people watching). We imagine public parks as democratic spaces par excellence, offering “relief…
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Reader of the Month: Winona
Happy #blackcatappreciationday ! Winona, friend of Public Books, is celebrating today with her 3 all-time favorite books. #animalliberation #whenspeciesmeet #menexplainthingstome A photo posted by Public Books (@publicbooksdotorg) on Aug 17, 2016 at 9:26am PDT
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The Art of the Communist Museum: The Leon Trotsky House in Coyoacán
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Villa Coyoacán, Mexico, home to El Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, is now a posh neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, but it was hardly more than a provincial town on the outskirts of the capital when…
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Public Streets Storymap
In each installment of Public Streets, our series dreamed up and curated by Ellis Avery, a writer reflects on a locale—a neighborhood, park, city, street—of personal importance …
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Around the World in 13 Reviews
Whether you’re traveling this summer or just in the mood for some armchair tourism, here are 13 reviews to fuel your cosmopolitan curiosity …
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The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand (HarperCollins India, 2016). Born in 1928, the artist Brij Mohan Anand was greatly informed by the political and social climate around him. Anand grew up…
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Underground Distractions, Shanghai
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Windows on trains and planes are equipped with shades: vertical or horizontal, rigid or supple. They modulate the vehicles’ apertures, allowing passengers to frame their gaze on the passing scenery as they please. The scenery available to us…
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How Well Do You Know Your Hemingway?
You probably know at least two things about Hemingway: that he loved to drink, and that he was assigned to you in high school. Here’s a third: today, July 21, was his birthday, and if he were still alive he’d be turning 117. (He would have hated all the clauses in that sentence.) What else…
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Prophecy in Future Perfect
This is the latest installment of our series An Engineer Reads a Novel. When you’re looking for representations of technology in literature, it often turns out that Jules Verne got there first. He imagined machines decades before they were made real: submarines, rockets, and “cars” (these were robotic elephants with velvet-lined passenger salons, but still)…
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Building Up the Alphabet Again
I am reading an interview with Mahasweta Devi from 2002.1 At 75, having won renown for her fiction about the lives of peripheral peoples, she is full of delight at her continued discoveries: “I do what I want to, go wherever I want to, write down whatever I like.” She travels and pokes around, she collects…
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Against Careerism, For College
Having just seen a new crop of students graduate from my university, and seeing them now off into the world—to jobs, internships, and further study—I find myself thinking about what college is for, what it results in, and the feelings that swirl around the event of graduation. In the longest single section of David Foster…
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Earnestine & Hazel’s in Memphis: A Place Known for its Dead
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. On South Main, in the newly revived arts district of downtown Memphis, sits a little dive bar called Earnestine & Hazel’s, named for the women who ran it in the middle of the last century. If you’re lucky, you’ll…
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Trump Syllabus 2.0
On June 19th, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a web version of a mock college syllabus that sought to explore the deep historical and political roots of Donald Trump’s political success during the 2016 Presidential campaign. The syllabus suffered from a number of egregious omissions and inaccuracies, including its failures to include contributions of scholars of…
