I often find myself pulling books from my office shelves to loan to whatever MFA student or undergraduate has dropped in for a visit. It’s a delight to first listen to a curious writer discuss their ...
Interviews
Global Cities and Their Discontents: Saskia Sassen and Teresa Caldeira in Conversation
In a moment in which the populist right wing is ascendant globally, cities can serve as beacons of hope ...
Madeline Miller on “Circe,” Mythological Realism, and Literary Correctives
Madeline Miller is a Boston-born writer who currently lives in Philadelphia. Her degrees include a BA and ...
Public Thinker: Louis Moore on Athlete-Activists before and after Kaepernick
In late 2016, amid the furor over Colin Kaepernick’s on-field protests against police brutality and rampant ...
Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York
With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed ...
Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power”
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the white-power movement ...
Public Thinker: Thomas J. Sugrue on History’s Hard Lessons
From producing towering classics in the field of urban history to penning ...
Public Thinker: Jack Halberstam on Wildness, Anarchy, and Growing Up Punk
Defying disciplinary categorization, Halberstam’s work draws on ...
Public Thinker: Josephine Livingstone on the Critic’s Voice
As a graduate student, Josephine Livingstone realized early that an ...
Public Thinker: Stuart Kirsch on Engaged Anthropology
Stuart Kirsch began his career as an anthropologist doing research on myth ...
Public Thinker: T. L. Taylor on Gamergate, Live-Streaming, and Esports
The qualitative sociologist T. L. Taylor is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and cofounder and director of research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to ...
Francisco Cantú Talks Borders, Rhetoric, and Climate Change
Twenty pages into my first reading of The Line Becomes a River, I laid the book ...
Public Thinker: David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Abolition, and Memory
Puzzling out the meaning of the Civil War and its aftermath has been David Blight’s lifelong work ...
Great Liberations: Writing Beyond the Academy
Bridging scholarly and popular writing is what good essays have always done. ...
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
Anna Biller on Classic Films and Twitter Feminisms
To date, the independent filmmaker Anna Biller has tweeted somewhere in the ...
“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen ...
Public Thinker: Issa Kohler-Hausmann on Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration
While most critics of the American criminal justice system condemn mass incarceration, fewer have ...
“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works ...
Public Thinker: Matthew Engelke on Thinking Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke is one of the leading anthropologists of his generation ...
