Tag
University of California Press
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Public Picks 2024
What were the books of 2024 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?
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Crossings into Indigenous Palestine
“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them,” wrote Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “Their oil would become tears.”
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Protean Environment and Political Possibilities
As the planet warms, environmental destruction obliges us to revise the technoscience expertise and institutions once based on colonial legacies.
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On Our Nightstands: May 2023
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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Riding with Du Bois
Railroads—in the Jim Crow South just as in today’s Ukraine—employ physical infrastructure to create racial divisions.
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The New Geography of the Carceral State
As the urban poor are displaced to metropolitan peripheries, policing and punishment have become more suburban.
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The Art We Do Together: “Art Worlds” 40th Anniversary
Howard Becker pointed out that critics, curators, suppliers, and administrators are as important to the creation of art as artists themselves.
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Rereading the Revolt
In May 1381, rebels burned documents at Cambridge, then scattered the ashes to the wind. But why were universities targeted by the rebels?
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The Planet Needs Collective Action—Not Tech
Digital tech cannot stop climate change merely by “greening” individual consumption.[none-for-homepage]
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Worker Worries Are the Seeds of Worker Action
Apps like Uber benefit from making their workers strangers to one another. So what happens when workers start caring for one another?
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Immigration: What We’ve Done, What We Must Do
Once, abolitionists had to imagine a world without slavery. Can we similarly envision a world where migrants are offered justice?
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As American as Child Separation
The United States tears families apart—during slavery, in the wars against indigenous people and the war on drugs, and, today, at the border.
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Think like a Virus
Rather than accepting that a virus will come, we can learn how viruses live and thrive—and work to suppress them before they take off.
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The Black Rebel Athlete: Spectacle and Protest
As more and more protests make clear, the bodies of Black people playing sports are not outside history. Indeed, they never have been.
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Bunkers, Buffers, Borders
“Flagged for deportation, I was hurtled into my own little nightmare, an absurdist take on all the immigration tragedies raging across the world.”
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When’s the Beef?
In Terry Bisson’s 1991 sci-fi story, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” two characters discuss alien life-forms that have been attempting to make contact with their species. The conversation returns again and again to the baffling paradox that these life-forms are sentient and intelligent—“relatable” in most ways—yet ineffably alien, because “they’re made out of meat.” If…
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Make Allies, Break Empires
“Do you want to join the army, or do you want to go to jail?” This question—typically posed by a judge to a teenager charged with a petty crime—animated …
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The Immigration Crisis Archive
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down the US government’s last remaining long-term immigrant holding facility, an …
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Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver-partners.” Colbert was right to be skeptical: if fully implemented, such technology would result in the loss of an estimated 25,000 jobs per month. Kalanick’s response…
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The Future of Migration
In 2008, in a town of about 2,000 people, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 389 workers and charged them with civil immigration violations and identity theft. The Bush administration had decided to experiment with mass workplace arrests and assembly-line judicial proceedings. The target was a kosher meatpacking plant in rural Postville, Iowa. What most…
