“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
Tag: Yale University Press
Poetry for the Deluge
Amid this turbulent present, can poetry call attention to creative forms of survival and persistence, human and nonhuman?
The Borderland between Language and Genre
Within western poetry, women writers of color—and their lived experiences—are not nearly as recognized nor represented as their white peers.
What’s in a Bookstore?
For more than five centuries, equilibrium between profit and passion has remained elusive to book buyers and sellers.
Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus
In their writings, Kafka, Roth, and Kraus rejected the ideology of rootedness that was rapidly encroaching upon early 20th-century European consciousness.
Can Free Assembly Survive the Internet?
When the internet is in everything, its problems are everywhere.
How to Hear Campus Free Speech
Can a pragmatic approach to free speech on campus produce more inclusive, and more educational, institutions?
What’s in a Name?
Stanley Lieberson wrestled with the problem of causation throughout his prodigious research career, but nowhere more ingeniously than in A Matter of Taste.
On Our Nightstands: June 2020
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
Who Gets to Be a Jewish Writer?
“The term ‘Jewish writer,’” argues Cynthia Ozick, “ought to be an oxymoron.” Yet 82 years earlier, in 1924, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva proclaimed that “in ...
Let Us Now Praise Corporate “Persons”
When presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend” during a 2011 campaign appearance at the Iowa State ...
Resisting the Rhetoric of Disaster
Ever since the Arab world achieved political independence, its great hopes for self-determination and freedom have been built up and razed down several times ...
On Our Nightstands: February 2019
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
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 ...
The Polyphonic Gospel
At one point in Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum the narrator speculates about how the Gospels came to be written: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet ...
Down with the Scribes!
Mesopotamian scribes knew a story about the invention of writing. According to this story, the momentous event occurred in the city of Uruk, where King Enmerkar coveted treasures from the neighboring ...
Taking Sides Against God
While mostly forgotten today, Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen was widely admired by his 19th-century contemporaries and went on to inspire the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and James ...
Editor 2 Editor: Priya Nelson and Joe Calamia
How important to an editor is the spark one feels (or doesn’t) about a potential project? How does one identify books that are surprising, new, and relevant? And ...