Category
Interviews
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“Our Guns Make the Violence That People Are Fleeing”: Ieva Jusionyte on Guns & Violence in Mexico
“I was already there, and I was already an ethnographer. I was interested in borders as sites of state violence. I became very curious and I thought I would like to follow the guns south.”
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“She Seems So Normal to Me”: Cassandra Neyenesch on Writing a Woman on the Verge
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Adventures Newly Narrated: Jessica Francis Kane on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Lost Adventure
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“If a Woman Commanded Fire”: Talking Historical Stoves and Affordable Energy with Joyce Chaplin
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“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins
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The Past as a Site of Radical Otherness in Nishant Batsha’s “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart”
“I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension you mention resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story.”
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Fantasy, Pedantry, and Painting: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the Novels of De Chirico
“I came to translating de Chirico very much by accident.”
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“Conjuring and Reality”: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton
“Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both.”
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“Suddenly, the New Story Was There”
“I had seen a lot of bitumen in the devastated landscapes of the bitumen mines. But seeing it here, in such a mundane and tranquil setting, surprised me. That was when I first understood that this material is natural.”
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“If You Do Something Social, You Have to Do It Local”: Pedro Lasch on Art, Protest, and Migration
“From the very beginning, I knew I was part of a social movement for undocumented immigrants’ rights.”
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“A Second Enlightenment”: Greg Grandin on Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity
“My books try to explain a tension.”
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“Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen
“The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.”
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“Independence and Abolition Went Hand in Hand”: Julia Gaffield on Jean-Jacques Dessalines
“Securing the first permanent, universal, and immediate abolition of slavery was Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s legacy.”
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Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
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“Flawed from the Outset”: Sonali Thakkar on the UN’s 1950 Attempt to Redefine Race
Liberal antiracism has been undermined precisely because it doesn’t answer the real questions that we care about.
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“Foolishness on the Page”: Talking with Zahid Rafiq
“What ends up in the writing is what the characters see, and what they see is determined by how they feel.”
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“That’s How You Survive”: Gloria Blizzard on Third Culture Kids and Black “Identity”
“I look at myself as a place of intersections.”
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Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin
“The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.”
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“Endless Bad Infinity”: Noah Kulwin and Brendan James on the Feedback Loop of American Empire
“We are not picking on things that were particularly happy memories for the American war machine.”
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America’s Pernicious Rural Myth: An Interview with Steven Conn
“Narratives about rural crisis seem to trap American discourse in a cycle of crisis and myth.”
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Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb
“What lies outside the weird—the subconscious, our dreams, our fantasies, the monster, the alien—these are possible sources of liberation.”
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“We Are Not Meant to Be Girls Alone in This World”: A Conversation with Gina María Balibrera
“It’s such a heavy and troubling history, but not entirely dismal. Humans laugh all the time.”
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“We’re Losing a Sense That We Made Them”: Webb Keane on AI and Human Morality
“We can’t fully grasp what’s new about it unless we also understand what we’ve seen before.”
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“The Basic Liberal Narrative Is Gone”: Immigrant Rights and Abolition with Silky Shah
“A singular focus on conditions, rather than the violence of immigration detention itself, just lent itself to expansion.”
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Beyond the “Burden of Belief”: Pádraig Ó Tuama on Religious Trauma, Eros, and Poetry as Prayer
“I began to look for other verbs when it comes to my doubt and my rage and my yearning and my sadness.”
