“Hurricane Maria ushered in a great deal of trauma and suffering, but it also allowed us to reassess the very nature of the political.”
Interviews
Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
“I Can’t Make You See What I See”: Talking with Cyree Jarelle Johnson and Jesse Rice-Evans
"Writing about lupus is like writing about ghosts. What do you say about something featureless?"
Public Thinker: Tressie McMillan Cottom on Writing in One’s Own Voice
“You don’t tell children not to grow. And you don’t tell a writer not to write.”
“The Places Where Things Blur”: Namwali Serpell on “The Old Drift”
“One of the reasons it took so long to write is that—as I would joke with my friends—I found myself writing the great Zambian novel.”
Patricia Banks on Supporting African American Museums
Studies of museum patronage mostly focus on social class. That's not the whole story.
Public Thinker: Jenny Price on Refusing to Save the Planet
“First: Why are we not making more progress? Second: Why do so many people hate environmentalists?”
Alison Carey and Amrita Ramanan on Theater and Climate Change
"Greenturgy" orients a theatrical production toward the play's environment. And every play has one.
Public Thinker: Kevin Gannon Sets the Record Straight
A professor of history at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the ...
Public Thinker: Donna M. Riley on Engineering, Ethics, and Social Justice
Donna Riley is a lifelong social activist and student of liberation theology who also happens to be a ...
Stephen McCauley on What Makes a Comic Novel
Stephen McCauley is the author of a bevy—a raft, even—of beloved comic novels. Recent ones include My Ex-Life, Alternatives to Sex, and ...
“Who Inherits?”: A Conversation between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby
Over the decades of her transatlantic career, distinguished Yale University professor emerita of American and African American studies Hazel V. Carby has considered how one negotiates ancestral ties ...
Public Thinker: Ian Bogost on Games, Doorknobs, and General Readers
Particularly with the advent of the handheld device, digital games now seem a ubiquitous part of our culture ...
Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the ...
“To Reach the Pure Realm of the Imaginary”: A Conversation with Cixin Liu
The renowned Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu is best known as the author of the best-selling, Obama-beloved, Hugo-winning, and truly mind-bending trilogy ...
Public Thinker: Frances Negrón-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor ...
“There Are Black People in the Future”: An Interview with Artist Alisha B. Wormsley
I think I make art because it’s what I’ve always done. It’s how I communicate my dreams. It’s how I stay alive, or rather it’s how I live ...
Writing for a Global Audience: An Interview with Poet Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed is one of the most significant literary figures of our time. He has ...
Temporal Lines
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “Temporal Lines: An Interview with Pedro Mairal, Samanta Schweblin, Fabian Martinez,” by ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
