Archive
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Close to the Bone: An Interview with Filmmaker Debra Granik
Debra Granik is the director and co-writer of Winter’s Bone, which was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her latest film, the documentary Stray Dog, follows the everyday life of a Vietnam veteran. A. O. Scott called it an “implicit challenge to the lazy habit of looking at American life…
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Making “Room”: An Interview with Novelist and Screenwriter Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room is the story of a 5-year-old boy who lives in a single room with his mother and has never seen the outside world. Donoghue recently adapted her novel into a screenplay, and the resulting film, starring Brie Larson, has been sweeping up accolades. It’s nominated for four Academy Awards on…
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The Future of Scalia’s Originalism
Speculation about Justice Antonin Scalia’s legacy has quickly gravitated to the staying power of his originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. Whether it will …
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Remembering Bowie: A Makeshift Père Lachaise at Lafayette and Houston
Anyone walking down Manhattan’s Houston Street on January 13 might have had some idea about what to expect upon reaching …
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How to Write about Videogames
I remember his blue-plastic hair, drawn back in a little bun that looked octagonal. I remember the pointy hat that crowned him in the eyes of other players: “Sorcerer’s petasos +1,” the “+1” indicating that it was marginally better than the regular version, and exponentially harder to get. I remember the winding wooded streets of…
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Life After Wartime
Fisher House looks like any other suburban American home: a well-manicured lawn; a kitchen stocked with Girl Scout cookies, Maseca, and ice cream; a living room with a flat-screen TV and children’s toys; a barbeque out back. But for the wounded soldiers at Fisher House, ordinary life is painstakingly reconstructed but never really achieved. In…
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Public Books Tote Bag Giveaway
What are you reading? Our new Public Books tote bag, which features a panel from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, is perfect for library runs, trips to the bookstore, and starting conversations with strangers on the subway. Click here to enter to win one of these limited-edition totes!
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Primal Scenes
This past year, Yoplait began airing a commercial, entitled “Mmm,” which features a family—a man, woman, and two children—eating yogurt, producing a chorus of “Mmms” as they ingest. The mother emits a particularly deep “Mmm,” to which the father responds with a louder “Mmm.” With the yogurt and spoon in hand, he starts rapidly banging…
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Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes the transformation of a writer exchanging the patient, polished realism of her first four books for a disquieting abstraction. It is a pleasure to witness sudden…
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Impunity
Human skin turns the color of lead as the body loses blood. It’s one of the physical signs, perceivable at plain sight in a homicide victim, marking the boundary between life and death. Another is the color of the blood itself, from the almost translucent, still glistening red of those recently massacred, to the blackening…
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Where do Morals Come From?
The social sciences have an ethics problem. No, I am not referring to the recent scandals about flawed and fudged data in psychology and political science.1 I’m talking about the failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life. A theory that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating, and…
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The “New York Values” of “City on Fire”
Some readers will come to Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire with chips on their shoulders. Hallberg’s youth; the seeming ease with which he parlayed his manuscript into an enormous advance …
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Harare in Four Pharmacies
Village Pharmacy in Harare’s upper income Borrowdale Shopping Centre is clean and quiet. There’s a faint antiseptic smell. Its shelves are neatly stacked with imported bath foam …
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Remembering Florence King: A Tribute to Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Novelist, essayist, and self-proclaimed misanthrope Florence King died recently, on January 6, at age 80. When I read the news on Facebook, I was surprised by the potency of my reaction. King’s wickedly funny 1985 memoir Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is one of my favorite books, yet many of the most voracious readers I know have…
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Back to Work
A job, in itself, is pure potential. I sometimes spend hours scrolling through job listings and Craigslist ads imagining different possible lives, each one viable. This is the type of fantasy that the main character of Helen Phillips’s recent novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, engages in. In a job taken out of necessity, Josephine Newbury processes…
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Cyborg Communitarianism
Since life on Earth is so hard, the utopian imagination likes to turn to space. Almost as soon as astronomers and their telescopes emptied the heavens of angels, philosophers like Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle and spiritualists like Emanuel Swedenborg rushed to imaginatively repopulate the newly familiar planets with allegorical utopias. After the “canals” of…
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Siri, Why Am I So Busy?: An Interview with Judy Wajcman
Smart technologies—phones, tablets, wearables, and time-saving apps—are supposed to lighten our load. So why are we always complaining about overwork? Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, tackles that paradox in her recent book, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Neta Alexander talked with her for Public Books…
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 2
In this second part of my survey of the growing field of graphic medicine, I review four recent nonfiction books about health, illness, recovery and loss. These books vary in many respects—in their visual styles and narrative approaches, but especially in the ways in which the educational and the personal are engaged. However, what they…
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Spinster Lit
When you travel for a living you have quite a lot of time to think about loneliness and detachment; doing so as a woman adds quite a few layers to that. Despite the much-touted progress of the last century there remains something slightly scandalous about the figure of the unaccompanied woman directing her own travel.…
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A Laborless Eden?
A utopian fantasy has always served as an engine for scientific progress—the fantasy that, one day, we might harness enough fossil fuel, enough computing power, and enough mined mineral wealth to create an army of machines that could finally deliver us from work and back to a laborless Eden. Paul Lafargue promised this to us…
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