Archive
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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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The Year of Black Memoir
My first week as a college freshman, in 1990, I sat in W. L. Harkness Hall and listened to Professor Robert Stepto lecture on African American literature. He began with the slave narratives, in particular the one by the man referred to as the father of African American literature, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Professor Stepto…
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Master of the Flying Nothing
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. Wrestling is based on iconography, on signatures. Wrestlers work in signature moves, in signature styles, in catchphrases and slogans…
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On Our Nightstands: January 2016
Here at Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. SHARON MARCUS Editor in Chief…
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To Be “A Glorious Thing Made Up of Star Dust”: A Suicide Note from the University of Hyderabad
In India, like elsewhere, the university is a place of upward mobility. It is also the tense meeting ground of social difference; of young people across caste, gender, religious, and sexual identities who encounter each other in the space of the classroom, where the divide between urban and rural, between English and the regional languages,…
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Rick Moody Annotates David Bowie
In light of the passing of David Bowie, we asked Rick Moody, who’s written extensively on Bowie, to annotate the lyrics of “Joe the Lion.” Click the highlighted words to see his notes. Joe the lion Went to the bar A couple of drinks on the house and he said “Tell you who you are…
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To Laugh, So as Not to Weep: Paul Murray’s Modern Banking Satire
Paul Murray’s novel The Mark and the Void is set in the bleak landscape of 21st-century banking. It’s a story about the relationship between an idealistic banker named Claude and a jaded writer named Paul. It’s a story that is very aware of itself as a story, and within which two seemingly incommensurable narratives—totalizing financial…
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How to Hide in Plain Sight: A Visual Essay
In an age of constant surveillance, is it possible to find autonomy online? In our book Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, Helen Nissenbaum and I look at how Internet users protect their data from governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. One strategy in particular drew our attention: obfuscation, or the deliberate production of…
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Thornfield Hall, Brooklyn
On her author website, Patricia Park explains that her decision to revisit Jane Eyre in her debut novel, Re Jane, derives in part from the fact that, when she acted out as a child, her Korean mother “would say in her limited English, ‘You act like orphan!’” Park adds, “This always puzzled me—how can you…
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Murakami’s Farewell to Despair
In a foreword to the recent publication of his two earliest novels, now made available in a good English translation for the first time, Haruki Murakami says that the novel that followed them, A Wild Sheep Chase, was “the true beginning of my career as a novelist.” Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Pinball, 1973…
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Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was exceptional.”1 This comes as no surprise, given that translation is a fundamental aspect of Levi’s writing, and that he considered it a vital tool in…
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Hard Labor: On the Complete Works of Primo Levi
Turin, the provincial capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, sometime in the mid-1950s. In a comfortable apartment block on Corso Re Umberto, a 19th-century boulevard running southwest of the city’s elegant central squares and their pre-Alpine backdrop, two men, one in his late 30s, the other barely into his 20s, meet twice weekly to work…
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Street Space—North Street, Belfast
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The Belfast city center is fractured, divided by motorways, parking lots, empty buildings, and big box stores. Its 19th-century heyday put it on the international map of textile production, which transformed and enriched its built structure. This tight…
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Imagining Better Gods: An Interview with Danez Smith
Talking with Danez Smith is a lot like reading his poems: an engagement with a powerfully complex and circuitous mind that is always recalibrating …
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2015’s Most-Read on the Public Books Blog
Now that you’ve had a chance to look over our most popular features from last year, here were the top five most-read essays from our blog: “Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking,” by Christopher Schaberg It’s a phrase that’s parroted endlessly, but is anyone quite sure exactly what it means? “In the Great Green Room:…
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Technological Citizenship at the End of the World
Technology, we like to say, is making us antisocial; truncating our attention spans; addicting us; depleting our fossil fuels. This commonplace ignores and undermines the people who develop our technologies, and exonerates the people whose use (or abuse) of tech ostensibly reveals their (our!) human frailties. This is doubly problematic. Engineers are people. The technological…
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Quiz: Can You Match the Punk Memoirist to the Lyric?
In “The Female Body of Punk,” Ivan Kreilkamp reviews recent memoirs by Viv Albertine, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, and Carrie Brownstein. As Kreilkamp puts it, “Although these women position themselves in very different ways in relation to the movement and the music, their life narratives reveal the possibility of a punk history centered less around the…
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A Fantasy of Whiteness
“We could desperately use a clear-eyed assessment of the messy, complicated country that ruled much of the world not so long ago.”
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A Lesbian “Carol” for Christmas
As we approach the crest of film awards season frenzy, Carol, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, still in limited release, has captured the imagination of critics like no lesbian-themed movie before it. Named best film of 2015 by the New York Film Critics Circle, it comes in at…
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On Our Nightstands: 2015 Favorites
Here at Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Each month this year, we’ve given you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into our cultural diets. Now, for this special holiday edition of On Our Nightstands,…
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