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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Black Britons And The Politics Of Belonging: An Interview With Kennetta Hammond Perry
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month, I interviewed Kennetta Hammond Perry about her new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015). The book is part of the interdisciplinary series, Transgressing Boundaries: Studies…
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Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the 1920s: An Interview With Shannon King
This month, I interviewed Shannon King about his new book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era. Dr. King is Associate …
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“A Writer Should Never Get Over How Embarrassing This Is”: A Conversation With Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s debut novel, Inherited Disorders, makes its method visible to you as you read: you watch the book, feel it turning itself inside out in order to say something worth it. Its preoccupations—its stumbling blocks, but also its most beloved themes—are literally announced in the titles of the 117 tableaux that make up…
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Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets …
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Jamie Hector of “The Wire” on Acting and Activism
Back in April, Public Books co-sponsored a conference organized by The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University about the legacy of The Wire. The critically revered HBO series feels just as relevant eight years after it ended its run. On one panel, Jamie Hector—who gave an unforgettable performance as rising drug kingpin Marlo…
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The Fabric of the Times
In recent years we have watched hoods become wholly emblematic of social uprisings, political movements, and unrest. Sometimes overt, at other moments they work silently in the background—not wholly involved, but present nevertheless. It’s hard to avoid them. Hoods infiltrate mass media, political discourse, supermarkets, school uniforms, New York Fashion Week, our homes—but it is…
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The New Working Class
Tamara Draut is a policy expert and social critic based at Demos, a progressive think tank. Her latest book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, calls attention to the …
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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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From Fifth Avenue to Jamaica Avenue: Jacki Lyden Interviews Cintra Wilson
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Fashion is a multi-billion dollar global industry: New York Fashion Week alone is a $900 million enterprise, bigger than the US Open, Super Bowl, or NYC Marathon. It’s not surprising, therefore, that most fashion writers toe the line of the…
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The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and “commodity profiteers” who “sell us like deodorant.” My favorite line: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”1 If you have…
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Yorkshire Calling: An Interview with Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips is a British writer, born in St. Kitts. He has authored and edited a wide range of works, including plays, screenplays, documentaries, and non-fiction. His novels, with geographies that traverse the Caribbean, America, Europe, and Africa, are particularly celebrated—they have won numerous prizes, been widely translated, and together constitute a significant contemporary literature…
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Miserable Ways to Make Money: An Interview with Jake Halpern
“Banks are not the good guys in this scenario. The banks are squeezing as much as they can out of people.”
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Translating the Architecture of Desire: An Interview with Wallace Shawn
Well over a dozen years in the making, Wallace Shawn’s theatrical collaboration with André Gregory on Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play A Master Builder opened this summer in New York theaters—movie theaters, that is, as a film directed by Jonathan Demme. Much like Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle’s 1994 film based on an earlier Gregory/Shawn…
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Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned solely with aesthetic quality, the imagination, enjoyment, and so forth. On the other are the partisans of “political art,” for…
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The Art of Extraction: An Interview with Jean-Claude Carrière
Acclaimed French screenwriter and novelist Jean-Claude Carrière has had a career spanning more than 50 years and 90 writing credits, including the adapted screenplay for 1979’s The Tin Drum, which won both the Palme d’Or and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for that year, and many films directed by Luis Buñuel. One of…
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Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a distance. While we’re plenty familiar with drones thanks to the War on Terror, Asaro details the strategic rationale behind their use, along with the…
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Geoff Dyer’s American Liberation
Geoff Dyer may be the greatest complainer in contemporary literature. It’s a quality of Dyer’s writing that is often noticed but rarely celebrated, the snobbish and insecure voice on the page that’s infectious even when annoying and runs through all his best work. In a way Dyer’s writing exists in its own genre—a genre of…
