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The Wednesday after the 2016 election, my son, Julien, arrived home from school crying. “Do we have to go home, too?” He had been talking with some of his ... The post Loving Wilderness, Loving Borders appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2WKn3RJ

In late 2016, amid the furor over Colin Kaepernick’s on-field protests against police brutality and rampant ... [none-for-homepage] The post Public Thinker: Louis Moore on Athlete-Activists before and after Kaepernick appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2JFiqVa

Biologists use the term endling to refer to the last remaining member of a particular species. As of May 2019, there is only one remaining Blockbuster video store left, located in Bend, Oregon ... The post Be Kind, Rewind appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2Vl1llJ

In the early 1980s, an Indian guru homesteaded a tract of ranchland in rural Oregon, building a utopia equipped to withstand both HIV and American hypocrisy. Armed with free love and even freer enterprise (and guns), the Rajneeshees and their ostensible leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (nowadays more popularly known as Osho), delivered equal measures of chaos and titillation to the American public... The post Marriage and Other Shams appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/30bDwQL

With New York City teetering on the brink of fiscal collapse at the end of 1975, Congress passed, and President Ford signed, legislation that authorized loans to stabilize the City’s finances. The terms of these loans, Treasury Secretary William E. Simon later recalled, were “so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city … would ever be tempted to go down the same road again.” In... The post Public Thinker: Kim Phillips-Fein on Austerity and the Fall of New York appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/305KxTk

People across the world recognize the olive tree as an icon of Palestinian survival, but much less is known about the significance of the limestone outcroppings ... The post “They Demolish Our Houses while We Build Theirs” appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2LtLOQT

Midway through Mike Birbiglia’s latest one-man show, The New One , the ceiling above the stage ... The post Surrogacy Stories appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2HaqudY

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Compared to the People’s Front of Judea’s comical political ignorance in Monty Python’s satire The Life of Brian, post-Enlightenment European countries were deeply familiar and preoccupied with Roman legacies... The post On the Brink of Failure appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2IZcgja

I worked two “jobs” during my first summer as a graduate student in Indiana. One involved telemarketing research, convincing people to answer telephone survey questions designed to help businesses assess product marketability. The pay was minimal and the work infrequent, based entirely on the number of surveys my company had been hired to administer any given week. I’ve held down many an... The post On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2LuGLzs

My childhood drawings were not particularly skillful or original, but they were dense with people. I drew huge families (my own was small): brothers and sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents all facing the viewer, each in a detailed outfit complete with hair ribbons, jewelry, and hats. At one point—I was maybe 9 or 10—I developed an obsessive fear that without a set of ears, nostrils, tiny... The post B-Sides: Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2PEnsSM

On June 22, 1999, Jessica Lenahan’s estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, abducted their three daughters from outside Jessica’s house, in Castle Rock ... The post What the Constitution Means to Us appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2VbjIhF

In Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet , a woman, Carmella, revels in sending letters to strangers ... The post The Return of the Surrealist Women appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2XRb5pp

A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver and his fingernails, he pieces it all together to produce a tiny talisman capable of channeling the world’s intelligence. To consumers, the iPhone can seem hermetic, consummate, all-of-a-piece—an... The post The World Silicon Valley Made appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2IXKWkH

No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets ... The post Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2Vu8N1O

Writers are sexy figures. Until recently, we tended to imagine them as drunk and glamorous, Hemingway at the bar in Cuba or Frank O’Hara partying with artists. Now that pop culture has become health-obsessed, the internet is saturated with writers’ daily routines and snacking habits. But what about translators? What do they—or rather, we—do all day? Online, we’re nearly invisible. Some... The post Translators and Other Icons appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2IDRPrW

Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist friends are wont to do. “You’ll like it,” he said. And then, in response to what may have been something unpersuaded in my aspect: “In the first place, it’s extremely funny.” Now, an ardor for the antic, a weakness for that weakest of rhetorical... The post Killing Joke appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2URjIn3

Adoption narratives are hard to tell. This is ironic given that adoptions are fueled by stories. Birth parents tell themselves that giving up their child is for the best and that the child will be better off with their new family. Adoptive parents convince themselves that building a family through adoption is no different than creating one biologically. Love, they say, is what makes a family... The post Adoption and the Abundance of Narrative appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2Zshl8M

Kathleen Belew is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and an international authority on the white-power movement. Drawing on an expansive collection of archives, Belew wrote the field-defining book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018). She developed research methods for tracking a network of anti-government extremists from a... The post Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power” appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2DltmTY

How to tell a story always matters enormously. This already urgent task takes on added dimensions and gravity when the story itself is about information ... The post America Learns What Russia Knew appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2XkX1nR

In the novels and short stories about Ferrara that he published in the 1950s and ’60s, Giorgio Bassani uncovered the Fascist side of his hometown that many ... The post “Who Knows If They Found Any Burial At All?” appeared first on Public Books . from Public Books http://bit.ly/2KLezIr