Bridging scholarly and popular writing is what good essays have always done. ...
Interviews
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
Anna Biller on Classic Films and Twitter Feminisms
To date, the independent filmmaker Anna Biller has tweeted somewhere in the ...
“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen ...
Public Thinker: Issa Kohler-Hausmann on Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration
While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have ...
“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works ...
Public Thinker: Matthew Engelke on Thinking Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke is one of the leading anthropologists of his generation ...
Editor 2 Editor: Mary Francis and Gita Manaktala
How does a scholarly book differ from a dissertation, or a string of articles? What does and doesn’t change with a shift to digital publishing? Is industrial espionage ...
Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential ...
Staging Disability: An Interview with Martyna Majok
Martyna Majok just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her original play Cost of ...
Taking Sides Against God
While mostly forgotten today, Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen was widely admired by his 19th-century contemporaries and went on to inspire the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and James ...
Editor 2 Editor: Priya Nelson and Joe Calamia
How important to an editor is the spark one feels (or doesn’t) about a potential project? How does one identify books that are surprising, new, and relevant? And ...
“The College That Enters the Prison Is Transformed”
The Bard Prison Initiative is a full-time, degree-granting college program ...
No Exit: Recreating George Tooker’s “The Subway”
Late on election night in 2016, I rode the subway home from what I had hoped would be a celebration, but the car was full and quiet and covered by a pall. Perhaps not everyone was thinking of the election ...
The 90-Second Newbery: An Interview with James Kennedy
“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century ...
Live Theory: An Interview with Tom McCarthy
“It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.” This is the final sentence of ...
Aslant to the Flâneur: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin
Early on in Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse the author offers up an imaginary definition ...
Public Thinker: Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things
Scholars who want to write beyond the academy often ask, where are the ...
What The Left Today Can Learn from Paul Robeson
Gerald Horne is one of the leading and most influential historians in the nation. His research explores racism in a variety of contexts, involving labor, politics ...
The Intrusion Artist
By the late ’50s, when he was already widely considered one of France’s finest filmmakers, Robert Bresson would confess in interviews that he hardly ever went to the movies. There was something about ...