Tag
Public Sphere
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The Once and Future Bathhouse
Utilitarian public baths and pools once filled the world’s cities, but now new expensive spas are taking their place. Has even bathing become a luxury?
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Turkey’s Progressive Past
In her posthumously published memoir, written in the late 1960s, the journalist Sabiha Sertel reflected on her life in exile from Turkey, her home country. She had lived through a period of authoritarian rule led by a man whose attempt to transform the country into a Western-style democracy had forced her and others into exile,…
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Indian Writers under Siege: A Roundtable
It is hard to remember a time when literature attracted so much front-page space, prime airtime, or mass attention in the Indian public sphere as it did in 2015. But not only was this importance accumulated through a particularly perverse chain of events, it was also a particularly toxic kind of importance. Writers, scholars, and…
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Street Space—North Street, Belfast
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The Belfast city center is fractured, divided by motorways, parking lots, empty buildings, and big box stores. Its 19th-century heyday put it on the international map of textile production, which transformed and enriched its built structure. This tight…
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Soft Atheism
It’s not easy being new. It doesn’t last long. Sometimes it isn’t even an apt characterization in the first place. Take “New Atheism,” the label applied to a body of writings by such figures as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. New Atheism is typically understood to have emerged in the first years of…
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The Correctionists
One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis. —Karl Kraus For an American audience, the first reaction to the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project is presumably: who is Karl Kraus? A quick survey reveals only a handful of English-language translations of this Viennese author, who lived from 1874 to 1936. Even academics with…
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Virtuous Citizens and Virtuous Cities
Immigration. Financial reform. Inequality. Climate change. Dysfunction has paralyzed America’s national politics and alienated its citizens. Not only do crises go unaddressed, but elected officials seem incapable even of agreeing on the need for government to fund itself. Politics has become more polarized, less reasonable, more ideological, and increasingly animated by a growing hostility to government itself.…
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Michael Nyman At 70
When asked to name a “minimalist” composer, most would say Philip Glass. Steve Reich, John Adams, and Terry Riley resonate with those a bit more familiar with classical music. Yet few know that it was the English composer Michael Nyman who coined the term in a 1968 piece he wrote while working as a music critic and…
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Ordinary Lives
“Nobody’s listening!” (“Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté,” or literally, “The country, in a word, feels that it is not listened to.”) Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of history at the Collège de France in Paris, makes that statement the cornerstone of an ambitious project (of which more shortly) to counter the…
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Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them. I say this after having read widely across the rapidly accumulating literature in defense of the humanities, to which this book loosely belongs. Strictly speaking, The Humanities and Public Life is a record of a seminar on…
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The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, to talk about Turner’s new book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. A prequel to the influential From Counterculture to Cyberculture which…
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Storybook Plutocracy
George Packer’s The Unwinding is a minor masterpiece of the social-disintegration genre—a beautifully written, clinically observed story of the slow-rolling economic transformation that has, over the …
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Virtual Roundtable on The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
First published in 1965, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a reference volume for poetry enthusiasts and literary scholars alike. Last year, a significantly revised fourth edition appeared, covering 110 nations, regions, and languages, and with 250 new entries on subjects ranging from “boustrophedon” (bidirectional texts) to “hip-hop poetry” and “anthem, national.” Public…
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Reflecting Absence: An Interview with Michael Arad
Michael Arad’s winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial has created a landmark for New York City and for design. “Reflecting Absence,” the theme and title of Arad’s winning entry, raises questions about loss and memory, but also about bringing life to city streets. In conversation with Harel Shapira, Arad discusses the democratic uses…
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How Did Susan Sontag Get to be So Famous?
In our time, how many American critics have been celebrities? How many have had the kind of name recognition that allows them to be casually mentioned in a mainstream Hollywood movie, or enough star power to be featured (along with their apartments) in People, the magazine which pretty much invented today’s celebrity culture? Not many.…
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Recycling Literary Culture: A Conversation with Lúcia Rosa
Over the past decade, a new style of publishing has emerged as a response to the economic and environmental conditions facing twenty-first-century Latin America. Cardboard books, colorfully hand-painted and assembled by workshop collectives, are now bought and sold in nearly every major Latin American city. The “cartonera” publishing collectives take their name from cartoneros: urbanites…
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Virtual Roundtable on Amy Waldman’sThe Submission
Last fall Public Books sponsored a lively roundtable discussion of Amy Waldman’s widely praised novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which considers what might have happened if the winner of an anonymous architectural design competition for a Ground Zero memorial had been an American Muslim. The novel poses questions about our obligations as…
