Articles

  • 1 week ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

    In the new episode of Writing Latinos, we talk with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo about his most recent book, Puerto Rico: A National History—out next month in paperback from Princeton University Press. Meléndez-Badillo offers a sweeping history of the island since Spanish colonization. Most provocatively, he chronicles a long tradition of thinking about Puerto Rico as an independent nation, even though it has been a territorial possession for the better part of five hundred years.

  • 2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

    Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it?

  • 2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

    Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt … [and they] hope that the lie will be convincing. … These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts. … The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie.

  • 2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

    “What is a university and who is it for?”This was the question to which this essay was supposed to respond. It’s a question I turn over and over again in my mind, walking myself in circles. Federal agents have detained, kidnapped, and disappeared multiple graduate students for their participation in peaceful protest against Israeli genocide. Anti-Zionist speech is an act of domestic terror.

  • 3 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

    Early in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, architect László Toth is shown building a desk accompanied by a nondiegetic recording of the first time David Ben-Gurion read aloud, in Hebrew, the Israeli Declaration of Independence. On the surface, what we see doesn’t relate to what we hear; we have just seen László arrive in America, and while we have heard the character speak in English, Hungarian, and Yiddish, it is unclear whether he understands Hebrew.