Tag
Interview
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“Our Guns Make the Violence That People Are Fleeing”: Ieva Jusionyte on Guns & Violence in Mexico
“I was already there, and I was already an ethnographer. I was interested in borders as sites of state violence. I became very curious and I thought I would like to follow the guns south.”
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“She Seems So Normal to Me”: Cassandra Neyenesch on Writing a Woman on the Verge
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Adventures Newly Narrated: Jessica Francis Kane on Penelope Fitzgerald’s Lost Adventure
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“If a Woman Commanded Fire”: Talking Historical Stoves and Affordable Energy with Joyce Chaplin
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“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins
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The Wonderful Capacities of Other Animals
“As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds have vivid dreams, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination.” —Charles Darwin, Descent of Man Darwin’s evolutionary theory did more than establish a corporeal commonality between species; it also raised hard questions about commonalities of consciousness. David Peña-Guzmán, cohost of…
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“As Good As It Gets”: Talking Liberalism with Kevin Schultz
“Up until Franklin Delano Roosevelt, very few Americans actually called themselves liberals or embraced anything that was called ‘liberalism.’”
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“We Want You to Leave Home”: Crystal Sanders on Black Southerners and “Segregation Scholarships”
“I began to realize that the state of North Carolina was paying for Black students to go north as a way of preserving segregation. These were what I call ‘segregation scholarships’ to study elsewhere.”
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The “Emotional Economy” of Parenting: A Conversation with Nina Bandelj
“I am an observer of how intellectual ideas travel and enter into everyday life, or how they come to be performed by families in ways that give those ideas a reality of their own.”
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“I use the story to do the thinking”: Ann Leckie on Writing “Radiant Star”
“Panicking never helps. Building a new model of how things work (in your mind, and in the world) is going to take time and will be the result of many small, inglorious acts.”
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“The Interdisciplinary Nature of Food Is Now Un-ignorable”: Alicia Kennedy on Food Writing, Food Security, and Food Justice
“Food writing can no longer just be ‘go to this restaurant’ or ‘explain this dish or cocktail.’”
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“Disaster Has Happened and Is Happening”: Tara Menon on What the Novel Reveals
“I wanted to propose grief as perhaps the most appropriate response we can have to what is happening to the natural world—the disappearance of coral reefs in the Andaman Sea and bird habitats in New York.”
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“Not So Ephemeral After All”: Talking Op-Eds, War, and Memory with Bécquer Seguín
“Why does the op-ed still hold sway over writers who want to be intellectuals or want to have some public presence?”
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Cloth and Complicity: Seth Rockman on Plantations, Textiles, and the Art of Weaving
“But I had found a set of instructions in the archives of one of New England’s leading manufacturers of low-end woollen cloth for enslaved wearers.”
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The Past as a Site of Radical Otherness in Nishant Batsha’s “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart”
“I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension you mention resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story.”
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“Conjuring and Reality”: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton
“Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both.”
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“If You Do Something Social, You Have to Do It Local”: Pedro Lasch on Art, Protest, and Migration
“From the very beginning, I knew I was part of a social movement for undocumented immigrants’ rights.”
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“A Second Enlightenment”: Greg Grandin on Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity
“My books try to explain a tension.”
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“Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen
“The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.”
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“Independence and Abolition Went Hand in Hand”: Julia Gaffield on Jean-Jacques Dessalines
“Securing the first permanent, universal, and immediate abolition of slavery was Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s legacy.”
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Are Species Timeless?: Talking with Bathsheba Demuth About the Arctic
“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”
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“Flawed from the Outset”: Sonali Thakkar on the UN’s 1950 Attempt to Redefine Race
Liberal antiracism has been undermined precisely because it doesn’t answer the real questions that we care about.
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“Foolishness on the Page”: Talking with Zahid Rafiq
“What ends up in the writing is what the characters see, and what they see is determined by how they feel.”
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“That’s How You Survive”: Gloria Blizzard on Third Culture Kids and Black “Identity”
“I look at myself as a place of intersections.”
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Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin
“The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.”
