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“I deliberately wanted to reposition a place that is so often seen as a periphery, and it came from the sense that anybo...
10/07/2025

“I deliberately wanted to reposition a place that is so often seen as a periphery, and it came from the sense that anybody’s home is at the center of the universe, right? For people living in the Arctic, these are their homelands, so of course for them the region is the center of the world, in the sense that it’s the place where your imagination operates from.”

New at PB: In the latest in our Public Thinker series, Gabriel N. Rosenberg interviews Bathsheba Demuth about her book "Floating Coast" (W. W. Norton), which narrates the Arctic not as an edge, but as a center.

“There was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic.”

“There is a wealth of hijabi stories to be told. The storytellers just need the money to give them a chance.” New at PB:...
08/07/2025

“There is a wealth of hijabi stories to be told. The storytellers just need the money to give them a chance.”

New at PB: Jannat Suleman tracks the differences in hijabi representation on TV and in films. Hollywood studios, she concludes, rarely portray hijabi women, and when they do, there’s often much that’s misrepresented.

Why is hijabi representation divided between small-screen success and big-screen blunders?

"Curtis Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Thomas Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the prese...
03/07/2025

"Curtis Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Thomas Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the present administration.”

New at PB: Ivan Kreilkamp unravels the troubling Thomas Carlyle-to-Curtis Yarvin-to-JD Vance intellectual pipeline. "Sometimes the Fascist jackboot," Kreilkamp writes, "just slides right onto the foot."

Curtis Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Thomas Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the present administration.

“Mystery is the art of attending to place anew, alive to its secrets and its violence.” New at PB, Spencer J. Weinreich ...
02/07/2025

“Mystery is the art of attending to place anew, alive to its secrets and its violence.”

New at PB, Spencer J. Weinreich reviews “The Metropolitan Opera Murders,” an ill-received mid-century murder mystery written by Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel that recently returned to print as part of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series.

Opera demands a generous sense of the preposterous. So too does the mystery novel.

“When we see MAGA Republicans and far-right figures becoming the arbiters of what antisemitism is and isn’t, then up is ...
02/07/2025

“When we see MAGA Republicans and far-right figures becoming the arbiters of what antisemitism is and isn’t, then up is down and down is up. We’re in a really, really terrifying place if we capitulate to their characterizations and demands.”

New at PB: In the latest installment of our partnership with Recall This Book, John Plotz talks with Sonali Thakkar about her recent book “The Reeducation of Race” (Stanford University Press).

Liberal antiracism has been undermined precisely because it doesn’t answer the real questions that we care about.

“Johnson’s is not a story of unbridled optimism but a history that attends to pockets of resistance, to the formation of...
19/06/2025

“Johnson’s is not a story of unbridled optimism but a history that attends to pockets of resistance, to the formation of political power that got in the way, and to the wider violence embedded in Texas without glorifying it in turn.”

New at PB, Emma Pask reviews “Texas: An American History” (Yale University Press), which shows how the state’s obsession with telling its own history in the present is a central political tool.

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has unfortunately also been a place where those liberties find some of their ends.

“Often lost in discussions of displacement, banishment, mobility, and evacuation, are the ways in which the city itself ...
18/06/2025

“Often lost in discussions of displacement, banishment, mobility, and evacuation, are the ways in which the city itself is made through displacements elsewhere.”

In the latest Public Streets, ‪Sophie Gonick takes us to a block of 34th Avenue in eastern Jackson Heights where the community comes together at the Jackson Heights Immigration Center.

Thirty-Fourth Avenue is a reminder that displacement from one location, perhaps at a far remove, can instantiate emplacement elsewhere.

“There is virtue in the good enough, value in frivolities, and diminishing returns on perfection.” New at PB, Jenny L. D...
17/06/2025

“There is virtue in the good enough, value in frivolities, and diminishing returns on perfection.”

New at PB, Jenny L. Davis‬ and Hayoung Seo review four new books on AI that address the technology’s impact on interpersonal connections, teaching and learning, productivity practices, and policy spheres.

Four books about a new age of AI tell stories of sluggish processes, ambiguous outcomes, emotionally charged issues, and generous margins for error.

“Foregrounding climate change creates an irresolvable tension. Its enormity generates a conceptual boundlessness that ou...
12/06/2025

“Foregrounding climate change creates an irresolvable tension. Its enormity generates a conceptual boundlessness that outstrips a single writer’s capacity for inventiveness.”

New at PB, Keith Woodhouse explores Stephen Markley’s “The Deluge” (Simon & Schuster) which he calls a “climate assessment drama.”

The novel demonstrates the challenge of articulating a totalizing phenomenon of environmental destruction through the narrow aperture of fiction.

Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.

“In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppr...
11/06/2025

“In both novels, labor is laden with horror precisely because its mundanities so easily mask inequality, structural oppression, and even the tyrannies of fascism.”

New at PB, Kaitlin Bui reviews Alia Trabucco Zerán’s “Clean” (tr. Sophie Hughes) and Michele Mari’s “Verdigris” (tr. Brian Robert Moore‬) two post-fascist novels set in Chile and Italy, respectively, that exemplify the genre Bui calls Labor-as-Horror.

“Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.

“The authority of AI has been secured through rampant speculation about the technology’s capabilities that might emerge ...
11/06/2025

“The authority of AI has been secured through rampant speculation about the technology’s capabilities that might emerge in the future.”

In a review of three recent books, Emanuel Moss‬ argues for a realpolitik of AI. Only realism, he contends, can break through the binary of techno-optimism and techno-cynicism.

Today’s AI arms race demands a healthy dose of realism.

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