Tag
Feminism
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“Seize the Means of Knowledge Production”: Durba Mitra on Third World Feminists and Their Fight Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism
“I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society.”
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Virtual Roundtable on “UnREAL”
Leading up to the launch of its second season this week, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Marti Noxon’s UnREAL has garnered both critical acclaim and scintillating buzz, especially since it was revealed that season 2’s “suitor” on the Bachelor-esque reality show-within-the-show is African American. To date, such a casting decision still hasn’t come to fruition in…
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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 directs—on the horizon, Shapiro has made a reluctant entry into the limelight on awards show red carpets, Paley Center panels, and other events for the…
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Live Through This
I used to refer to my dark times as the IWTDs, when the mental refrain I want to die so dominated my thoughts that I took to writing the acronym in the margins of books I was reading. It was a huge improvement when I began scribbling STFA—stay the fuck alive—in my books instead. One…
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An Interview with Former Black Panther Lynn French
Lynn French was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968–1973, working in Chicago, Berkeley, and Oakland. In the Party, she worked in newspaper circulation, labor …
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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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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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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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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 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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Ferrante, in History
What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan tetralogy is complete, it’s clear that Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe…
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The Female Body of Punk
A decade after the Sex Pistols were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the once marginal and vilified punk movement has, for better and worse, been thoroughly assimilated as a major aesthetic and cultural force. One welcome effect of this canonizing process has been a recent wave of new memoirs by some…
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A Muslim Future to Come?
The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other inhabitants and observers, I find it difficult to comprehend why the militants assaulted this historically working-class, vibrant, multicultural, and youthful neighborhood—admittedly often characterized…
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Why Boys Must Cry
In contemporary Nigerian literature, muscular heroes of postcolonial independence have lost their swagger. Today’s patriarchs read like quaint fogies, stomping their feet about government, money, and gender roles. Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, The Fishermen, recuperates this toothless archetype with superb grace. His task is not to rescue the patriarch from becoming his country’s flattest character…
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Suffragettes Take Hollywood
An industrial laundry in 1912 London, the steam infusing the air, the sweat on the workers’ faces so vivid the viewer herself feels the heat. These laundries were not only literal sweatshops; they also surrounded workers with burning toxic lye. This opening scene in Sarah Gavron’s new film, Suffragette, is as powerful as any that…
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Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics
What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. I can only speak for one childhood—and one adulthood—spent reading Le Guin, but I’d bet my last nickel there are thousands of us out there. Tolkien knew how to conquer Evil; Beverly Cleary and Louise Fitzhugh put…
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Pornography Porn
In the fall of 1990, at the beginning of my senior year of college, I became obsessed with pornography—or, rather, I became obsessed with the feminist debates about it. From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, pornography, along with sex work, butch-femme, and S/M, divided the feminist community, leading to public debates, legal battles,…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which…
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Saving Muslim Women
The 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris—along with the brutal activities of ISIS—have spurred a resurgence of concern about Islam in Western media. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof fretted …
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On Spectacle and Silence
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 1 We sat on the couch together. The burble-voiced sportscasters, the referee’s whistle, “First down and 10.” I was, I am tethered to my father. His fingers…
