Tag
Simon & Schuster
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Is the Cis Literary World Okay?
Contemporary trans literature is thriving in a highly freewheeling manner… How revealing, then, that David Brooks recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality.
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The 21st-Century Social Scientist
“If we want technologies that will not undermine our humanity, social analysts must join with other researchers.”
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Thy Face Tomorrow
What does it take to live without the ability to smile or move half of one’s face? For that matter, what does it take to live at all?
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Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
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On Our Nightstands: January 2020
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 …
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Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of Public Picks, we’ve asked our editors for the Public Thinker series, Literary Fiction, Higher Education, Children’s & Young Adult Literature,…
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Killing Joke
Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist friends are wont to do. “You’ll like it,” he said. And then, in response to what may have been something unpersuaded in my aspect: “In…
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America Learns What Russia Knew
How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information …
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On Our Nightstands: January 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 …
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Public Thinker: David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Abolition, and Memory
Puzzling out the meaning of the Civil War and its aftermath has been David Blight’s lifelong work … [none-for-homepage]
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Idleness as Flourishing
It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to it, that wasting time is not a waste of time. Paradox infuses the experience of…
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B-Sides: Mary McCarthy’s “Rogue’s Gallery”
About her wit there was never disagreement. It was sharp, and it was cold. Even by her own account, Mary McCarthy’s pen was a scalpel, her eye …
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Beautiful Games?
In the early ’90s, cable TV reached the Vermont woods. The wire running up our dirt road brought MTV, C-SPAN, and a regional station called the New England Sports Network (NESN), which aired …
