Energy companies promise to “go green.” Yet they use the same forms of extractive capitalism that have destroyed the planet’s climate.
Tag: Nonfiction
Why Seek Impossible Foods?
The Impossible™ burger does pollute less. But does this matter, in the face of capitalism’s continued control of the global food system?
Democracy, More or Less
What future does democracy have? What future should it have? And, moreover, can the problems of democracy be solved within the framework of democratic politics?
Pencil Leaners
The collective ventures of the Federal Writers’ Project force us to think about how writing might be reinvented in the context of economic crisis.
Tales from the Crypto
Techno-utopians rarely acknowledge that untraceable money transfers support a world of kleptocrats, tax havens, and dark-money politics.
Is Retirement Retired?
Instead of a recognition of a life devoted to a single firm, pensions are now the source of strife between management and workers.
Making Therapy Work for Asian Americans
How does one negotiate the truth within a network of Western racist stereotypes that pathologize the East, alongside equally Western ideas about “insanities”?
Public Thinker: Nancy K. Miller on Feminist Lives
“Although I was reluctant to generalize about women’s friendship, I was also thinking about a model that would counter the male model of friendship.”
How to House America
Fixing the American housing crisis will require constructing more houses, but also increasing subsidies and protections for existing tenants.
“The Culture of Narcissism” @40—and Counting
What if today’s self-centered world was born decades before digital media, as part of a much longer transformation of American society?
Public Picks 2020
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
Mother Courage
The summer I turned 17, in the springboard pause between high school and university, I began working as a nurse aide in the geriatric rest home and hospital run by my mother.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
Transforming Teaching amid the Coronavirus
Even though most professors are forced to value research over teaching, many are excellent teachers. It’s time to honor that skill.
More Mobility, More Problems
A philosopher examines how upwardly mobile students might thrive, and why they often will not.
Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
Mexico: The Essential Neighbor
Paul Theroux’s On the Plain of Snakes is the richest portrayal of contemporary Mexico available to Americans, and an urgent one.
The Myth of the “Sixties”
When we mythologize the ’60s, we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us.
