Writing Latinos is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.
Tag: History
Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now
Mexico once cultivated a “special relationship” with death. But cultural globalization and rising violence is weakening that bond.
Armenia: Another Century, Another Genocide?
From the start of Armenia’s independence in 1991, Turkey took a hostile position toward its erstwhile victim of genocide. That hostility remains.
Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022
What can readers learn from five centuries of circumnavigation?
Small Nations, Big Feelings
In the 1930s, Americans fell in love with Czechoslovakia and Spain; today, it’s Ukraine. What happens when one finds a “second mother country”?
On Our Nightstands: September 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
“Beowulf”: A Horror Show
Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of “Beowulf” forces us to think about what we need to be true about the past, and our access to it.
Public Thinker: Lara Putnam Wants You to Knock on Your Neighbor’s Door
“Campaigns matter in part because of who meets whom, about the social networks that are shaped by that campaign as well as shaping it.”
America’s “Land Grab” Universities: Robert Lee on Colonial Extraction by “Treaty-Like Agreements”
“It’s not about the land underneath campuses. It’s land at a distance, that can be sold or managed to raise funds for endowments.”
B-Sides: J. G. Farrell’s “Troubles”
His characters—in 1919 Ireland, 1857 India, and 1940 Singapore—intuit that the world is about to collapse. But they can do nothing to save it.
“Just Use the Telephone, Please”: Hannah Zeavin on the Power of Teletherapy
“You can have really intense intimacy over distance, sometimes only because distance is there.”
Xenophobia Powers the United States
Since 1892, the United States has deported more immigrants (over 57 million) than any other nation.
The Best Classroom Is the Struggle
“As a historian and educator of college students, my experience teaching on US imperialism is one of disappointment.”
Rick Perlstein on Garry Wills
“Your first, last, and only obligation is to the reader and to the truth as you see it, without fear or favor.”
Private Pain, Public Disinvestment: Talking Student Debt with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
“Individual Americans thought they were the only ones who could not afford to send their kids to college.”
An Uncommon, Unconquerable Mind: Our Friend, Julius S. Scott III (1955–2021)
“Are there ways in which Black North Americans connected to places and things that were outside of the world we thought they were in?”
Living with the Future in South Asia
For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Tony Judt
“Writers are being made to carry the weight of politicians.”
Public Thinker: Imani Perry on How to Understand “Souths Plural”
“At the end of the day, the America project was about an encounter with abundance that was responded to with greed and brutality.”