Max Holleran is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Melbourne. His work focuses on urban development for tourism in the European Union, and he has written about architectural aesthetics, postsocialist urban planning, and European nationalism for anthropology, sociology, and history journals. His work on cities and politics has appeared in Boston Review, New Republic, and Slate.
Max Holleran
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Writing on Public Books
The Secluded Self: Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” @100
Why did Americans start distrusting small towns? The answer is one book, in which a woman moves from the city—and loses her freedom.[none-for-homepage]
Your Prius Is Not Enough
Many of those who voted for Donald Trump were elated by his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. For Trump supporters, environmentalism is a dirty word, and like other policies designed to protect the natural world, the Paris accord was bad for American jobs, foisted on the country by out-of-touch tree huggers. Environmentalists, the stereotype […]
Benidorm After Brexit and the “Burbuja”
In the early 1950s, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza left Benidorm, the sleepy coastal town he governed, to make the 300-mile trip to Madrid by Vespa. He had an audience with General Franco …
Backpacking Across “Stand Your Ground” Territory
The young man’s travel tale is a stalwart of American publishing. There’s the very famous story of two boys on the Mississippi, the Beat novel about road-tripping written on a giant spool of paper, and Tom Wolfe’s journalistic account of the Merry Pranksters (diehard trippers in both senses of the word). While American literary road […]
The Citizenship Business
In April 2015, men in hazmat suits and safety masks buried over two dozen bodies on the Mediterranean island-nation of Malta. The waterlogged corpses, victims of a capsized dinghy, had been desperate migrants fleeing poverty and war in Syria, Libya, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The bodies interred in Malta were just a few of the thousands […]
How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the restaurant—with a menu that includes frog legs and a bottle of Bordeaux that sells for $2,000—is an incongruous new addition to an area of Brooklyn where […]
The Villagers Strike Back
The pueblo has always occupied a contentious position in the Spanish national psyche. The word means both people and village, a correspondence that occasioned considerable anxiety in Spain’s leaders when, in the early 20th century, the country attempted to shake off its rural and provincial image. During the Spanish Civil War, Republicans equated pueblos with […]
