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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“Arguments stand or fall to the degree to which the practice is done well.”
on Aug 10
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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“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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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