“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century ...
Interviews
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 ...
Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the ...
We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign ...
The Mundane And Extraordinary Aspects Of Black Women’s History: An Interview With Kali Nicole Gross
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month I interviewed Kali Nicole Gross about her ...
From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime
Lethal police encounters between black Americans and law enforcement authorities have been a source of protest and resistance historically ...
Making Labor Visible: An Interview with Ramiro Gomez
The work of Ramiro Gomez draws attention to the domestic workers and day laborers upon whose ministrations luxury lifestyles depend …
Black Britons And The Politics Of Belonging: An Interview With Kennetta Hammond Perry
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month, I interviewed Kennetta Hammond Perry about her ...
Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the 1920s: An Interview With Shannon King
This month, I interviewed Shannon King about his new book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era. Dr. King is Associate ...
“A Writer Should Never Get Over How Embarrassing This Is”: A Conversation With Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s debut novel, Inherited Disorders, makes its method visible to you as you read: you watch the book, feel it turning itself inside out in order to say something worth it. Its ...
On Frantz Fanon: An Interview With Lewis R. Gordon
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and ...
Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be ...
Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets ...
Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also ...
Jamie Hector of “The Wire” on Acting and Activism
Back in April, Public Books co-sponsored a conference organized by The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University about the legacy of The Wire. The critically revered HBO series feels ...
The Fabric of the Times
In recent years we have watched hoods become wholly emblematic of social uprisings, political movements, and unrest. Sometimes overt, at other moments they work silently in the background—not wholly ...