“Individual Americans thought they were the only ones who could not afford to send their kids to college.”
Interviews
An Uncommon, Unconquerable Mind: Our Friend, Julius S. Scott III (1955–2021)
“Are there ways in which Black North Americans connected to places and things that were outside of the world we thought they were in?”
Public Thinker: Imani Perry on How to Understand “Souths Plural”
“At the end of the day, the America project was about an encounter with abundance that was responded to with greed and brutality.”
Public Thinker: Sophie Gonick on Housing Justice and Mass Movements
“As often the most vulnerable in our cities, immigrants face struggles that reflect the wider landscape of housing precarity.”
“Cheerfully Monstrous”: Dodie Bellamy on Writing and Grieving
“I didn’t pay much attention to what was being put in the archives… there are letters that, if I had been paying attention, wouldn’t be there.”
Habits of Mind: John Warner on Teaching Writing
“You fall short and then you wonder, 'what could I do differently next time that gets us a little bit closer?' I love that process.”
Hiding in Plain Sight: Talking Aquifer Depletion with Lucas Bessire
“The everyday ways that people challenge environmental destruction can be quite powerful.”
Why Does the State Allow Environmental Inequalities to Persist? Talking with Jill Lindsey Harrison
“What state and federal environmental regulatory agencies in the US have not yet done is reform the way agency staff make decisions.”
Borders Cast Long Shadows on Nations: Talking with Malini Sur
“Borders continue to gather life’s promises, even when walls and checkpoints brutally divide nations and societies.”
“Having to Explain Who You Are”: Caryl Phillips on Baldwin, Fiction, & Sports
“The first thing he said is, ‘Don't call me Mr. Baldwin. My name is Jimmy.’ I thought, this is ridiculous, at the very least he's James.”
Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds
“What if we identified the politics of municipal debt as circumscribing political horizons and futures?”
Public Thinker: Chawne Kimber on Constructing Quilts and Speaking History
"You cannot talk about race without talking about cotton. The materials that I use are desperately important as a layer of meaning in the work that I make."
“Between the Experiment and the Essence”: Emma Ramadan Talks Translation
“For those of us who can feel unsettled in terms of identity, translation can feel like home.”
Public Thinker: Merve Emre Throws a Party for Different Readers
“One way to think about the act of annotating is that you are that meddlesome party gossip, telling the reader how to draw connections between the different parts of the text.”
Mapping Utopia in the Dark: Matt Tierney on Literature and Technology
“This is not lowered expectations. It’s a wish for a mass normalization of resistance to deadly ways of looking at the world.”
Imagination or Regulation? Challenging the Incorporation of Antiracism as a Response to Crisis
The way we talk about racial justice matters. In fact, corporation’s embrace of antiracist slogans can actually advance racism.
To Teach Shakespeare for Survival: Talking with David Sterling Brown and Arthur L. Little Jr.
“Nostalgia is not what Shakespeare represents for me; I don’t want to make Shakespeare great again. He doesn’t need that, and neither do we.”
How to See Silicon Valley: Talking with Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner
"The ways in which the community itself is breaking down felt like end game capitalism."
To Air Is Human
An aerodynamicist and an anthropologist discuss the world of “Dune,” finding it as aesthetically beautiful as it is functionally implausible.
“Streets Like Rivers”: Talking New York City with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
"Often, the question of which place-names stick is about which ones hit our ears right."