“There is definitely a line between victims and perpetrators. But that line is not essentially determined.”
Interviews
Open Letters, Open Secrets: Laurence Ralph on Police Torture in Chicago
“People rise through the ranks and are allowed to hide torture in plain sight because they become complicit.”
Borders Don’t Stop Violence—They Create It
The “border” is not a line on the ground, but a tool to enable violence and surveillance.
“They Don’t See Their Work as Surveillance”: Jennifer Pan on Chinese Welfare and Society
“It’s like ‘The Minority Report,’ only without psychics.”
“Winning Is Not Uncomplicated”: Louisa Thomas on Sports
"The real value, the biggest value, of sport to me is that it is this gigantic arena for feeling."
Public Thinker: Ainissa Ramirez on Putting the Story Back in Science
“We teach science as separate from the rest of the world. I want people who live in the world to see how they’re actually doing science.”
Public Thinker: Meghan O’Gieblyn on God, Machines, and Intelligence
“We can’t always explain how algorithms reach their decisions. The reasoning of algorithms, like the will of God, is unfathomable.”
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
"So many people don’t think about food as political."
Hope and Capital: Talking India with Ravinder Kaur
“Anyone who comes in the way of the ‘good times’ becomes a threat to capital, and to the nation-state itself.”
Public Thinker: Catherine S. Ramírez on Measuring the Unmeasurable
“That is the paradox of assimilation … You can be essential—an essential worker—and at the same time excluded from the CARES Act.”
Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar
Anthropology’s attention to the granular texture of someone’s life is a beautiful training for being a fiction writer.
We Can’t Look Away from the Courts: An Interview with Matthew Clair
"I see disadvantaged defendants’ cultivated expertise as accurate, even though it is often invalidated and punished."
“Create a Different Language”: Behrouz Boochani & Omid Tofighian
“Just do something. Just do something. Just a very small thing. I’m not an ideological person, really.”
Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Looks to the Night Sky
“There are two ways of reading Black invisibility and one of them is futuristic.”
Public Thinker: Katherine McKittrick on Black Methodologies and Other Ways of Being
“How might scientific storytelling, or stories of science, shape the struggle for liberation?”
Solidarity Is a Process: Talking with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Josh Kun, and Destin Jenkins
“Solidarity is not a thing. There’s no formula, no exact science. There is ongoing process.”
Public Thinker: Hua Hsu on Reading until You See Double
“When I write, I try to begin from a place of authority and then I try to lose it over time. I want to transfer it to the reader.”
Public Thinker: Shobita Parthasarathy on Why We Need to Diversify Expertise
“I'll say something controversial. Bioethics tends to not interrogate the details of science, let alone the more technical questions.”
“We Don’t Want the Program”: Jill Lepore on How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy
“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
"The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive."