B. R. Cohen coedits the Public Thinker series at Public Books. He is a professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the author of Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (2019). His next book, a history of the stories we tell about feeding the world, is forthcoming from The New Press (2027).
B. R. Cohen
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Writing on Public Books
“The Interdisciplinary Nature of Food Is Now Un-ignorable”: Alicia Kennedy on Food Writing, Food Security, and Food Justice
“Food writing can no longer just be ‘go to this restaurant’ or ‘explain this dish or cocktail.’”
“Recover, Replant, Return”: Talking Nuclear History, Writing, and Food with Kate Brown
“Were people in the past like me, did they feel like they were in some historic maelstrom? If they did, how did they scrape by?”
“Just Use the Telephone, Please”: Hannah Zeavin on the Power of Teletherapy
“You can have really intense intimacy over distance, sometimes only because distance is there.”
Public Thinker: Meghan O’Gieblyn on God, Machines, and Intelligence
“We can’t always explain how algorithms reach their decisions. The reasoning of algorithms, like the will of God, is unfathomable.”[none-for-homepage]
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
“So many people don’t think about food as political.”[none-for-homepage]
Public Thinker: Donna M. Riley on Engineering, Ethics, and Social Justice
Donna Riley is a lifelong social activist and student of liberation theology who also happens to be a … [none-for-homepage]
Public Thinker: T. L. Taylor on Gamergate, Live-Streaming, and Esports
The qualitative sociologist T. L. Taylor is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and cofounder and director of research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to … [none-for-homepage]
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications … [none-for-homepage]
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications … [none-for-homepage]
Public Thinker: Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things
Scholars who want to write beyond the academy often ask, where are the …
Public Thinker: Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things
Scholars who want to write beyond the academy often ask, where are the …
This Morning Was a Poem: On and Near Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit’s new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, is a morning poem. Last summer, I sat outside on a covered patio beneath the awning and read it straight through. I read for hours. The book had been widely praised in reviews from the New York Times to Slate, The Millions, and beyond. It would soon be […]
The Confidence Economy: An Interview with T. J. Jackson Lears
Questions about trust, faith, and chance in American cultural history are at the core of your work as I see it. Your interest in confidence and con men is especially striking …
