The Big Picture Archives - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/pbseries/the-big-picture/ a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship Sat, 17 Jan 2026 02:19:24 +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 The Big Picture Archives - Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/pbseries/the-big-picture/ 32 32 The Big Picture: Black Women Activists and the FBI https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-black-women-activists-fbi/ Tue, 21 Nov 2017 16:00:16 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=17106 According to a recently leaked FBI report, the agency is now watching a new group they have labeled “Black Identity Extremists.” These “BIE” groups, the Bureau asserts, are motivated by “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” and have “spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.” The FBI’s renewed targeting of […]

The post The Big Picture: Black Women Activists and the FBI appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: The Promise of Sanctuary https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-promise-sanctuary/ Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:00:01 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=17092 In June 2015, during the early days of his candidacy during the Republican primaries, Donald Trump declared: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” These sentences seemed to signify a new low in anti-Latino speech, but they are not new. […]

The post The Big Picture: The Promise of Sanctuary appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Gun Culture https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-gun-culture/ Fri, 17 Nov 2017 16:00:12 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=17012 The day after the Las Vegas shooting, Mark Romano called me up to tell me that Donald Trump was bad for his business. “Don’t get me wrong, I love him,” Mark clarified, reiterating his earlier comments about how Trump was “a genius,” and how Trump “gets the common man, people like me.” But for his […]

The post The Big Picture: Gun Culture appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Working-Class Environmentalism https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-working-class-environmentalism/ Thu, 16 Nov 2017 17:00:23 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16997 Trump can’t make sunlight expensive or slow the wind. He can’t make walking more polluting than driving, or energy efficiency more expensive than waste. For all the damage that Scott Pruitt and others are doing to the government’s environmental agencies, they can only block so much climate progress. Thanks to a surge of elite and […]

The post The Big Picture: Working-Class Environmentalism appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: “The Parliament of Bodies” https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-parliament-bodies/ Wed, 15 Nov 2017 16:00:17 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16970 Since the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, queer communities have fought back against homophobia and transphobia using art and camp cultural production, alongside more conventional forms of political activism. In our present moment of global economic and environmental crisis, we seek new forms of intervention, new articulations of the political project, new ways of finding […]

The post The Big Picture: “The Parliament of Bodies” appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-religion-and-the-republic/ Tue, 14 Nov 2017 16:00:08 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16941 I still remember reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time, as a freshman in college. I was astonished! How could this French aristocrat have understood us so well, I wondered ...

The post The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Social Solidarity https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-social-solidarity/ Mon, 13 Nov 2017 15:10:31 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16914 Like mom and apple pie, football brings Americans together. It enables spectators to participate in collective life loudly and (sometimes) proudly, despite competing team loyalties. Because such moments of unfettered collective effervescence are so rare in the United States, the #TakeAKnee movement is generating strong emotions on all sides of the conflict. To patriotic fans, […]

The post The Big Picture: Social Solidarity appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Trump, Trade, and War https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-trump-trade-and-war/ Fri, 10 Nov 2017 15:59:46 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16853 President Trump has proven to be a reckless leader. His refusal to denounce white supremacists, his repeated attacks on journalists and free speech, his courting of Vladimir Putin, his attempts to belittle and provoke the North Korean leader—every single one of these acts is corrosive and destabilizing. While the media has understandably focused on the […]

The post The Big Picture: Trump, Trade, and War appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Jews and Trump https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-jews-and-trump/ Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:00:39 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16796 Exit polls conducted during the 2016 election yielded a fact about the political allegiances of American Jews that was at once totally unsurprising and potentially misleading: over 70 percent of respondents who identified as Jewish cast ballots for Hillary Clinton. For all the attention heaped upon the prospect of Ivanka Trump as the nation’s first […]

The post The Big Picture: Jews and Trump appeared first on Public Books.

]]> The Big Picture: Confederate Revisionist History https://www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-confederate-revisionist-history/ Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:59:05 +0000 http://www.publicbooks.org/?p=16777 Donald Trump was elected on a wave of unrestrained white nationalism that promised to “take back our country,” and in so doing “make America great again.” His pandering to white racial resentment throughout the campaign was open and unapologetic. To whites who felt that their social status had been reduced by the advances in racial […]

The post The Big Picture: Confederate Revisionist History appeared first on Public Books.

]]>