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Jan 16, 2025 | 
publicbooks.org | H. Tam |Charlotte Rosen
Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties is a book of failures. Not a failed book: Its nine short stories dazzle and move. The failures are of the economic, social, and historical kind. While the book engages with the Khmer Rouge genocide that between 1975 and 1979 killed an estimated 1.7 million people (21–25 percent of Cambodia’s population), So is not interested in replay, repair, or redress.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
publicbooks.org | Charlotte Rosen |Kristin Oberiano
When I first encountered Alvita Akiboh’s research project several years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by a photo she presented of my hometown branch of the United States Postal Service. To many folks familiar with Post Office iconography, it looks like any other post office in any of the 50 US states. Yet I recognized that this office is thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the village of Barrigada (Barigåda) in the US territory of Guam (Guåhan).
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
publicbooks.org | Austin McCoy |Charlotte Rosen
For a weekend in May, rap artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar ignited a fierce battle that engulfed popular culture. Lamar struck first. On Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” Lamar set the stage for a relentless exchange of songs and disses between Drake, Kendrick Lamar, J-Cole, and Rick Ross. Drake responded with “Push Ups” and the controversial “Taylor Made Freestyle,” where the rapper utilized verses from AI renditions of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
publicbooks.org | Virginia Jackson |Charlotte Rosen
Women and poetry have long been confused with each other. From early warnings to women to beware of poetry’s seductions, to later addresses to women as if they were poems, to even later complaints that women read and write poetry too easily, to still later suggestions that women are historically instantiated poetic fictions, this intimate association has blurred the difference between poems and persons. But being mistaken for poetry has never made writing it easier.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
publicbooks.org | David Helps |Charlotte Rosen
When Evelyn Reeves bought her first rental property in 1969, it felt like freedom. Born in Los Angeles in 1941 to a waitress and a postal worker from Alabama, Reeves purchased this four-unit apartment building for just $1,600 down, thanks to a new federal mortgage program aimed at low-income Black homebuyers. “It was a great program,” she recalled in 2018.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
publicbooks.org | Lora Maslenitsyna |Charlotte Rosen
“Dark are the days ahead of us / and even darker—the nights.” These words—written just as Russian forces began to pour into Ukraine in 2022—were how Ukrainian American poet Oksana Maksymchuk described, in her poem “Genesis,” the bleakness of existing during times of war. Her poems and writings—collected in Still City—make clear that what defines the 21st century is catastrophe.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
publicbooks.org | Alix Beeston |Charlotte Rosen
Vita sits alone in her childhood bedroom, brooding over her film project. The film exists only as a folder of files she pulls up on her computer: videos, emails, message chains, photographs. We’re watching a film about the making of a film—called My First Film—and the film’s director, Zia Anger, masterfully handles the layers of artifice.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
publicbooks.org | Mason Wong |Charlotte Rosen
The “world’s most advanced surveillance technologies,” explains political scientist Minxin Pei, are to be found today in China. These domestic spying initiatives boast powerful data-collection capabilities, as well as ostentatious, science fiction–inflected names: Skynet, Sharp Eyes, Golden Shield. What’s important to Pei’s The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, though, is that none of this technology turns out to work particularly well.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
publicbooks.org | Olivia Stowell |Charlotte Rosen
In the premiere episode of MTV’s Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Lauren Conrad takes the object of her affection, Stephen Colletti, to visit her family’s under-construction beachfront mansion. The scene oozes excess: everything is washed in a lush, sun-soaked tone. A crane lifts a massive palm tree onto the property. Lauren walks Stephen through the construction site, pointing out the house’s most relevant features: “I have two closets.
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
publicbooks.org | Eleanor M. Johnson |Charlotte Rosen
Oh, Alien franchise. How I love you, and how bad you treat me sometimes. But never, ever so bad as this. I’m going to do something I rarely do. I’m going to review a movie I hated. It pains me to do this, but do it I must: because this film is terrible in ways that are important for the history of horror and for contemporary feminism. First, let me list the not important things about Alien: Romulus that don’t work.
