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From publicbooks.org

Public Picks 2024 - Public Books

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What were the books of 2022 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?

#reading #bookstodon #bestbooks2024 #bookrecommendations

on Mon, 11PM

From publicbooks.org

A Prison the Size of the State, A Police to Control the World - Public Books

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Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.

on Fri, 8PM

From publicbooks.org

The Poverty of Homeownership - Public Books

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On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has repeatedly been proven a relentless driver of inequality.

on Dec 13

From publicbooks.org

What If the Body Politic Kept the Score? - Public Books

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Bringing story and social action back into the healing process is the unfinished work of addressing existential suffering.

on Dec 12

From publicbooks.org

Making Fascism Work for Moderates - Public Books

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“The Southern Poverty Law Center describes The Camp of the Saints as ‘the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US.’”

on Dec 4

From publicbooks.org

“Only the Northern Lights”: The Russo-Ukrainian War and Its Poets - Public Books

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These poets unsettle a collective sense of melancholy into a generative force, from which a transformed historical imagination can emerge.

on Dec 4

From publicbooks.org

The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime” - Public Books

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The story of how Ed Carnes became a judge offers crucial lessons for those who hope to unwind the policies of mass incarceration.

on Nov 14

From publicbooks.org

Tickets Are for Remembering - Public Books

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Playbills, programs, tickets: such physical documents are no longer part of seeing a show on Broadway. Does it matter?

on Nov 7

From publicbooks.org

How to Botch a Horror-Feminist Sequel in Seven Depressing Steps: “Alien: Romulus” - Public Books

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“Alien: Romulus” is primarily concerned with its aesthetics, not with its ethics. But post-Dobbs, it needed to do more than look good.

on Nov 2

From publicbooks.org

When the Singing Turned to Screams - Public Books

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The city had to wash the blood of students off the ground, and both it and Emerson are pretending nothing happened.

on Oct 21

From publicbooks.org

Proust Curious: “Swann’s Way” - Public Books

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“The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment. And houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

on Oct 17

From publicbooks.org

Rethinking Holocaust Memory after October 7 - Public Books

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Why continue to teach the Holocaust? Why continue to build and visit Holocaust memorials and museums?

on Oct 7

From publicbooks.org

National Sovereignty’s Foundational Violence - Public Books

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“The line belongs to the government,” explains a Guatemalan “smuggler” of the border with Mexico, but “the path belongs to the communities.”

on Sep 26

From publicbooks.org

Planetary Alchemy, or, Learning to Read the Earth with “Zelda” - Public Books

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“Tears of the Kingdom” lets you play through the planetary archive. In so doing, it suggests the pleasures of thinking at planetary scale.

on Sep 24

From publicbooks.org

Public Thinker: Infrastructure Tells Us That We Need One Another - Public Books

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“Seeing infrastructural systems for what they are requires us to understand them as the product of massive collective investment and to reflect on the value of that.”

on Sep 24

From publicbooks.org

The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti - Public Books

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For Frederick Douglass, and for Black activists across the United States, there was no place more important to global Black freedom than Haiti.

on Sep 23

From publicbooks.org

The “Diet Soda” of Data - Public Books

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Synthetic data promises to fix racial bias in algorithms used in AI. But its promise is false.

on Sep 20

From publicbooks.org

Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra - Public Books

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“Literature has this remarkable, almost miraculous, ability to distill human experience.”

on Sep 12

From publicbooks.org

What’s a Theory to Do? - Public Books

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Given the scope of the crisis before us, we will need theory of all stripes to find our way forward.

on Sep 7

From publicbooks.org

What Is the Infrastructure of Critique? - Public Books

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The work of certain authors are infrastructuring critique: building new models of critique, which foreground how infrastructure is not just an object of concern, but a methodology for contemporary scholarship.

on Aug 16

From publicbooks.org

Fighting Discrimination and Sexual Violence in Women’s Prisons - Public Books

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Even at the low-security prison that held actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, sexual violence against imprisoned women is rampant.

on Aug 16

From publicbooks.org

Public Thinker: Jonathan Kramnick on the Craft of Criticism amid Institutional Decline - Public Books

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“Arguments stand or fall to the degree to which the practice is done well.”

on Aug 10

From publicbooks.org

The Author and the Eulogist: On Love and Death in Nonfiction - Public Books

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Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions.

on Aug 3

From publicbooks.org

Miyazaki’s Last Flight - Public Books

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Hayao Miyazaki’s greatness derives from his willingness to sit with and amplify the contradictions that define his animation.

on Jul 24

From publicbooks.org

Who Benefits from a “War on Corruption”? - Public Books

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Can anticorruption as a social movement or rhetorical strategy be a meaningful part of counterhegemonic resistance to such regimes?

on Jul 16

From publicbooks.org

The Encyclopedia Project, or How to Know in the Age of AI - Public Books

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In an age when AI regurgitates the blather of meaningless content, seeking its audience in the attention marketplace, it's a small wonder that it is hard to tell what is really real anymore.

on Jun 25

From publicbooks.org

The Essential Gratuitousness of César Aira - Public Books

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It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has

on Jun 24

From publicbooks.org

Permission to Jeer - Public Books

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It’s clear that something has changed in conservative politics over the last decade. An exploration of pro-wrestling fandom sheds light on why.

on Jun 24

From publicbooks.org

On the Edges of Fascism and Other Unsettling Possibilities - Public Books

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“Borders generate more human possibilities: citizens standing for the rights of noncitizens, finding them refuge, seeking them sanctuary, pushing at the margins of the state and its sovereignty.”

on Jun 23

From publicbooks.org

Containment and Care in the Sonoran Desert - Public Books

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Prevention through deterrence did not prevent or deter migration. Instead, it corralled migration, hid it from view, and made it deadly.

on Jun 6

From publicbooks.org

“Things Happen, As They Do in War”: From Chaucer’s Siege of Troy to the Siege of Gaza - Public Books

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“Troilus and Criseyde” is not often regarded as war poetry. But in 2024, it's impossible not to see the truth at the poem's core: it’s a work about a city under siege.

on May 28

From publicbooks.org

“We Were Not That Band”—But What Was Sonic Youth? - Public Books

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Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore's memoir may tell us about his life. But he doesn’t give us much insight into the band they were.

on May 20

From publicbooks.org

White Mediocrity Empowers White Villainy: A Conversation with Koritha Mitchell - Public Books

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“Not only does whiteness empower folk to destroy entire communities; it empowers them to say to your face that the destruction doesn't have reverberating effects in the current moment.”

on May 16

From publicbooks.org

It's Not Only Human Stories Worth Telling: Sigrid Nunez's Animal Novels - Public Books

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Why are animals so central to Sigrid Nunez’s thinking about the status of fiction?

on May 11

From publicbooks.org

B-Sides: L. Frank Baum’s “The Enchanted Island of Yew” - Public Books

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Many know L. Frank Baum for writing the book that inspired the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.” However, like any good magician, Baum had a lot more up his sleeve.

on May 8

From publicbooks.org

B-Sides: John Galt’s “Annals of the Parish” - Public Books

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For 30 or 40 years a book has been lurking on my shelves, a beautiful little Everyman’s Library edition published by Dent and Dutton, undated, with red fake leather binding …

on May 2

From publicbooks.org

You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel - Public Books

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“I grew up with this very firm sense that there were multiple places that I could consider a home, rather than homes simply.”

on Apr 26

From publicbooks.org

“The Joke’s Ultimately on Me”: “Diabetic of Enlightenment” on Academic Twitter - Public Books

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When it comes to academia, we live in a moment of heightened contradictions. And yet, graduate students and junior professors are frequently told we

on Apr 26

From publicbooks.org

Public Thinker: Chawne Kimber on Constructing Quilts and Speaking History - Public Books

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"You cannot talk about race without talking about cotton. The materials that I use are desperately important as a layer of meaning in the work that I make."

on Apr 23

From publicbooks.org

“A Theory of America”: Mythmaking with Richard Slotkin - Public Books

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"I was always working on a theory of America."

on Apr 20

From publicbooks.org

Between the Book Club and BookTok: Community Reading in Montreal - Public Books

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Page Break, a weekly hour of silent reading hosted by Montreal’s De Stiil bookstore, reveals broad generational differences in forms of literary community.

on Apr 20

From publicbooks.org

“Costs on All Sides”: Annie Dorsen on “Prometheus Firebringer” - Public Books

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“Technology creates the potential for conflict from the very start.”

on Apr 19

From publicbooks.org

A Poetics of Living Rebellion - Public Books

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Rebellions cannot be studied with our traditional toolbelt of Western historical methods.

on Apr 15

From publicbooks.org

The Pacific Islands: United by Ocean, Divided by Colonialism - Public Books

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“Deep in the Pacific, the impact of Western colonialism runs deep: it even shapes the way Pacific Islanders experience time.”

on Apr 12

From publicbooks.org

How Haiti Destroyed Slavery and Led the Way to Freedom throughout the Atlantic World - Public Books

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Not the United States, Great Britain, France, or any other enslaver deserves credit for ending slavery. Atlantic abolition began with Haiti.

on Apr 3

From publicbooks.org

Pieces of the Past at the Doctors House: Glendale, California - Public Books

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The house may appear as a mere physical artifact, but it contains larger stories of American migration and growth, reckonings with exclusion, and the advent of new technologies.

on Mar 26

From publicbooks.org

Subterranean Worlds and Liberatory Futures - Public Books

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The metaphor of the underground as political is rooted in the spatial undergrounds of nineteenth-century America.

on Mar 24

From publicbooks.org

The Multiplication of Monsters: From Gutenberg to QAnon - Public Books

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Throughout history the introduction of new and accessible media forms has increased the circulation and acceptance of rumors and disinformation.

on Mar 23

From publicbooks.org

The Revolution Will Be Caring - Public Books

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What makes something mutual aid or collective care and not capitalist charity?

on Mar 15

From publicbooks.org

Walter Scott’s “Rob Roy” @200 - Public Books

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What can Walter Scott’s sixth novel, Rob Roy, a phenomenal publishing success in 1817, tell us about the benefits and risks of a globalized economy today?

on Mar 7