Essays Archives - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/category/essays/ a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:56:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://www.publicbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/cropped-favicon-2-300x300.png Essays Archives - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/category/essays/ 32 32 The Waiting Is the Point: Time, Suffering, and Medicaid https://www.publicbooks.org/the-waiting-is-the-point-time-suffering-and-medicaid/ Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=65215 “To be poor and sick in America is to live in delay. The Medicaid system does not just reflect that reality—it enforces it.”

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]]> They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout https://www.publicbooks.org/they-would-not-dream-of-flowers-translating-through-the-tehran-blackout/ Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=65333 As the entire country was plunged into a digital blackout, the only light remaining in my room was the cold, clinical glow of my disconnected laptop. There, in that forced isolation, I sat translating a story about death.

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]]> AI=B+ https://www.publicbooks.org/aib/ Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64905 “The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”

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]]> “No Future” Lexicon: Nothingness https://www.publicbooks.org/no-future-lexicon-nothingness/ Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64843 Beyond the existential and metaphysical anxiety it provokes, nothingness also constitutes an ontological opening: it compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos.

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]]> Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” https://www.publicbooks.org/style-and-politics-on-the-national-security-strategy-of-the-united-states-of-america/ Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64926 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.

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]]> The Misuses of the University https://www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-of-the-university/ Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64643 Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?

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]]> XOXO, Ricardo Ortiz (1961–2025) https://www.publicbooks.org/xoxo-ricardo-ortiz-1961-2025/ Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64675 To hear him speak was to feel how literature can still shape a life; how beauty, thought, and feeling can move us forward together.

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]]> Eisenstein’s Unrealized Worlds https://www.publicbooks.org/eisensteins-unrealized-worlds/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64745 Can a film that was never finished reveal the possibility of an alternative social system?

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]]> “To Over-Be, To Over-Exist”: Russia’s War in Ukraine and the Grammar of Survival https://www.publicbooks.org/to-over-be-to-over-exist-russias-war-in-ukraine-and-the-grammar-of-survival/ Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64411 Even in that moment of the catastrophe, for Liudmyla, it is “we” that will over-be. And that “we” included us, on this other anonymous end of the screen.

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]]> Displacement as Method https://www.publicbooks.org/displacement-as-method/ Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.publicbooks.org/?p=64570 I left Gaza in 2014. My family stayed. I've lived in Algeria, now Taiwan... We move. This is not background information. This is method.

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