Category
Interviews
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“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.’”
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“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
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We Are the Authors of the Story of Citizenship: Daisy Hernández on America’s Myth
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“Disaster Has Happened and Is Happening”: Tara Menon on What the Novel Reveals
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“Recover, Replant, Return”: Talking Nuclear History, Writing, and Food with Kate Brown
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Aslant to the Flâneur: A Conversation with Lauren Elkin
Early on in Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse the author offers up an imaginary definition …
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Public Thinker: Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things
Scholars who want to write beyond the academy often ask, where are the …
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What The Left Today Can Learn from Paul Robeson
Gerald Horne is one of the leading and most influential historians in the nation. His research explores racism in a variety of contexts, involving labor, politics …
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Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the topic without the requisite gravitas. In James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods, a harrowing tale of slave labor in the contemporary United States,…
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We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign …
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The Mundane And Extraordinary Aspects Of Black Women’s History: An Interview With Kali Nicole Gross
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month I interviewed Kali Nicole Gross about her new book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dr. Gross is Professor of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research concentrates on black women’s experiences in the…
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From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime
Lethal police encounters between black Americans and law enforcement authorities have been a source of protest and resistance historically …
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Making Labor Visible: An Interview with Ramiro Gomez
The work of Ramiro Gomez draws attention to the domestic workers and day laborers upon whose ministrations luxury lifestyles depend …
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Black Britons And The Politics Of Belonging: An Interview With Kennetta Hammond Perry
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month, I interviewed Kennetta Hammond Perry about her new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015). The book is part of the interdisciplinary series, Transgressing Boundaries: Studies…
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Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the 1920s: An Interview With Shannon King
This month, I interviewed Shannon King about his new book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era. Dr. King is Associate …
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“A Writer Should Never Get Over How Embarrassing This Is”: A Conversation With Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s debut novel, Inherited Disorders, makes its method visible to you as you read: you watch the book, feel it turning itself inside out in order to say something worth it. Its preoccupations—its stumbling blocks, but also its most beloved themes—are literally announced in the titles of the 117 tableaux that make up…
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Invoking the Translator: A Conversation with Raqs Media Collective
Since their international breakthrough in 2002, the Raqs Media Collective—Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta—have created and curated an extensive body of work spanning text, performance, video, sculpture, animation, sound, computer algorithms, and the photographic image. Raqs (pronounced rux), based in Delhi, have had recent major exhibitions in Madrid, London, Buenos Aires, Mexico City,…
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On Frantz Fanon: An Interview With Lewis R. Gordon
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at UCONN-Storrs; Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean…
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Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be suitors through an online dating site known as Lovability. The series of awkward exchanges met with gentle scoffs and knowing laughter from the assembled audience. As social…
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Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets …
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Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also directs—on the horizon, Shapiro has made a reluctant entry into the limelight on awards show red carpets, Paley Center panels, and other events for the…
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Jamie Hector of “The Wire” on Acting and Activism
Back in April, Public Books co-sponsored a conference organized by The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University about the legacy of The Wire. The critically revered HBO series feels just as relevant eight years after it ended its run. On one panel, Jamie Hector—who gave an unforgettable performance as rising drug kingpin Marlo…
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The Fabric of the Times
In recent years we have watched hoods become wholly emblematic of social uprisings, political movements, and unrest. Sometimes overt, at other moments they work silently in the background—not wholly involved, but present nevertheless. It’s hard to avoid them. Hoods infiltrate mass media, political discourse, supermarkets, school uniforms, New York Fashion Week, our homes—but it is…
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The New Working Class
Tamara Draut is a policy expert and social critic based at Demos, a progressive think tank. Her latest book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, calls attention to the …
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
