Why are Anglophone novels more worthy of attention than Ottoman shadow puppetry or the art of knot-tying? Just what are the humanities for?
Tag: Oxford University Press
On Our Nightstands: September 2021
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
“They Don’t See Their Work as Surveillance”: Jennifer Pan on Chinese Welfare and Society
“It’s like ‘The Minority Report,’ only without psychics.”
Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement
Ten years ago today, Spain’s “15M” movement burst on the scene. In short order, everything changed. Or has it?
Apartheid’s Paper Trail
Why did some Black South Africans directly collaborate with their oppressors, and what was their experience like?
The Human Nature of Disaster
A storm is never just wind or rain. Our natural problems are social problems. The solutions to them must be social, too.
The Spy Who Came In from the Carrel
In Nazi Europe, countless books were banned. So those who saved books—whether university archivists or Jewish scholars—became smugglers.
What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?
As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
America Comes Out
Once, “coming out” was something done within gay social worlds. Today, new groups do so to refute stigma, and to reclaim that stigma as pride.
Longing for the Writer’s Space
How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
Can Smart Cities Be Equitable Cities?
Tech does not arrive in a city to save it. Instead, tech’s financial success depends on dismissing and exploiting existing disparities.
On Our Nightstands: July 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront ...
How Can Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform Coexist?
Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects ...
Dancing through Dark Times
What can dance contribute to the contemporary politics of resistance? If politics is about movement—uprising, oppression, resistance, setback, advance ...
Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of ...
The Future of Migration
In 2008, in a town of about 2,000 people, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 389 workers and charged them with civil immigration violations and identity theft. The Bush ...
America Learns What Russia Knew
How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information ...
Free Speech and Equality on Campus
Every day at one of the over four thousand colleges and universities in the United States, some eager individual is denied the opportunity to speak to college students ...
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...