Category
Reviews
-
The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
-
Secrets in the Stacks
A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.
-
When Universities Are Agents of the State
The story of Israeli universities serves as a warning for what US academia could become.
-
“The Brutalist”: Rebuilding, Repatriation, and the False Antidote of Aliyah
“The Brutalist” takes a stand for human rights and against the institutions that facilitate—or even rely on—the dehumanization of everyday people.
-
B-Sides: Percival Everett’s “Wounded”
“Wounded,” by shutting down fictions of escape, shows readers the struggle for safety is a shared one.
-
The Translator’s Dilemma: Thinking Versus Doing?
Would we get a different view of translation if we turned to translators themselves?
-
Borders May Change, But People Remain
The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping the memories of these conflicts alive.
-
Scholars Have Lost the Plot!
Scholars of literature have often struggled to connect with fans of literature. Both value the same thing, so why the lack of mutual understanding?
-
Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams?
The story of Gatsby, Nick, Tom, and Daisy is also, much more importantly, part of the history of hundreds of millions of student readers and their teachers, spanning eight decades.
-
Perfect Recordings of Lost Voices
The film itself is warning you: No matter how beautifully shot, Jolie sitting at a table is not Maria Callas.
-
On Our Nightstands: March 2025
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
-
“It’s Just Scary”: Abuse and Power in College Football
“I was very much harassed and coerced by [Coach] and the staff for the better part of my time [in the program]. [Coach] would spread rumors to other members of the staff and players about me in an effort to get me freezed out.” This is what a recent former Power Four college football player—who…
-
B-Sides: “Under the Sea-Wind” by Rachel Carson
Bill McKibben proclaimed nature’s demise in 1989. But Americans who cared about DDT’s poisonous effect and the extinctions that would follow had been warned almost three decades earlier. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) famously opens by imagining a world denuded of plant and animal life. In fact, it wasn’t only Americans Carson managed to terrify.…
-
Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite!
Immediacy, here, is an aesthetics of ambivalent aspiration, within a hierarchically ordered and immobilizing class- and race-based cultural system.
-
Purging the Monster: French Cinema Puts Bad Mothers on Trial
In both “Saint Omer” and “Anatomy of a Fall,” we are meant to identify with the defendants—albeit for different reasons.
-
Money for Nothing: Finance and the End of Culture
Art continues to get made—that’s what human beings do—but capital devours it.
-
Civility and/or Social Change?
“Agreeing to disagree” requires tolerating the intolerable.
-
Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
-
B-Sides: Gloria Steinem’s “The Beach Book”
In Gloria Steinem’s now-forgotten first book, she offers detailed instructions on how to build a sandcastle, how to tan, how to peel if you burn, and more.
-
The Costs of Having It All: On Netflix’s “Dubai Bling”
“Dubai Bling” reveals contemporary shifts in public discourse on feminism and the patriarchal family unit.
-
When Language Is Lost, What Can Be Gained?
Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language?
