Public Books

Public Books combines the academic world with the accessibility of the internet. Established in 2012 by Sharon Marcus, a professor of literature, and Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist, the digital magazine aims to share insightful writing that is knowledgeable yet easy to understand. Their goal is to add scholarly insight to conversations about current ideas, culture, and politics. Each weekday, they release one essay or interview, totaling five pieces each week.

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Albert Camarillo on “Compton in My Soul: A Life in Pursuit of Racial Equality”

2 days ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Albert Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He’s one of a small number of people who founded the academic field of Chicano/Latino history. He has also mentored so many of the historians who’ve written books that teach us much of what we know about the history of Latinos in the United States.
2 Angry Men: On Eastwood, Trump, and the Law

3 days ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

A woman in a black blindfold gropes her way down a corridor in chilling silence. A man grips her arms: “Okay. You Ready?” he hisses. A blindfolded woman, her abductor: we must be in a slasher film. As the man removes the blindfold, we see that the walls feature bright painted creatures: a snail with antennae erect, a flying monkey, a swarm of butterflies. We know this trope: the children’s nursery that turns nightmare.
Making Migrant Spaces: 34th Avenue, Queens

1 week ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

Every Monday and Wednesday, dozens of migrants converge on a block of 34th Avenue in eastern Jackson Heights as part of the work of the Jackson Heights Immigrant Center (JHIC). They sit on folding patio chairs and makeshift benches at a long table in the shade to fill out asylum applications. A handful of volunteers—many of them also migrants, who have arrived in the last few years—helps them complete the paperwork.
“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism

2 weeks ago | publicbooks.org | Megan Cummins

What unites Jordan Peele’s Us, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (remade into a Hulu series), and the most recently viral Severance? We might call this a new genre: Labor-as-Horror, given rise, perhaps, by how much “labor” has been in the headlines.
We Better Laugh About It: Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí

3 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? Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form.
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo on “Puerto Rico: A National History”

1 month 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.
Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde

1 month 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?
“Lying in Politics”: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

1 month 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.
When Universities Are Agents of the State

1 month 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.
“The Brutalist”: Rebuilding, Repatriation, and the False Antidote of Aliyah

1 month 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.