Novelists from George Eliot to Mary Gordon ask readers to confront our lives as ethical dramas that run only once, and with great consequence.
Essays
What Is the Genre of Rape?
While some progress has been made, TV is still trying to figure out how to tell the stories of male-identified rape survivors.
Good Teachers Know That Bodies Matter
Students must choose to do the work that will facilitate learning, so teachers must give them reasons to make that choice, again and again.
Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
Can Game Theory Combat Discrimination?
Originally used to decipher the 1950s nuclear stalemate, the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” might reveal how resources are unfairly distributed today.
Re-Word the World: On “Sonnet’s Shakespeare”
What happens when we dismantle the monumental status of a figure like Shakespeare in the canon? What other voices rise to describe the world?
Shirley Hazzard, Poet of Aftermath
Hazzard was given to lingering in the fraught silences that follow great tumult, taking the time to find something worth saying.
Can Free Assembly Survive the Internet?
When the internet is in everything, its problems are everywhere.
Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do
Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?
What Was the Classroom?
As many COVID-era courses have moved from seminar rooms to Zoom meetings, the haptic nature of teaching has changed. Is anything lost?
On Our Nightstands: February 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
A Labyrinth for Our Time
What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound?
What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?
As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
How to Build a World
Storytelling like that of Ursula K. Le Guin or Hayao Miyazaki reveals how real-world politics is similarly an act of collective “world building.”
How to Step Out of Comfort Zones
Caribbean authors—and the “disorderly” women of whom they write—can reveal how important it is to seek out one’s true self.
As American as Child Separation
The United States tears families apart—during slavery, in the wars against indigenous people and the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.
Quizzical: Which Academic Press Are You?
We don’t judge books by their covers, but we do sort people based on which academic presses match their personality types.
Plants and Other Science Fictions
Can thinking like a plant save the world?
The Arch of Injustice
St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?
Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change
What should climate-change writing be? What is its ambition as it moves forward?