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Public Books is an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship.

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“And accept that the answer may be ‘yes’ to both. To serve the goals of a movement in the physical world, we need to treat digital platforms as funnels, not destinations.”

New at PB: As genocide unfolds in Gaza, we turn to platforms that profit from our witness. Nataliya Bondareva asks: Are we fueling the very systems we seek to resist?

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Nataliya Bondareva that reads: “To make tech work for [activism], we have to ask of our online activity—are we complicit? And are we effective?”] by @public_books

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19 hours ago

“The lasting impact is really the report itself. It is the knowledge of what the government is capable of and that it has a deep history of breaking the law to undermine political movements in the United States.” (Matthew Guariglia)

New at PB: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Church Committee Report, a sweeping investigation into spying by the CIA, FBI, and US Military. Here, Morgan Barry, Matthew Guariglia (@mguarig), and Brian Hochman (@brian_hochman) discuss the report’s findings and legacies.

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Brian Hochman that reads: “We live today in a moment in which the executive is acting like a rogue elephant, to use Frank Church’s famous metaphor.”] by @public_books

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2 days ago

“The Soviet citizen who finally received his two-room apartment and settled around the kitchen table could plan a life; that plan was rational and it was completed on schedule. What it did not include was any vision of what the life was for.”

New at PB: Jan Burzlaff reviews Mark B. Smith’s “Exit Stalin” (@w.w.norton), “
a sweeping social history of Soviet life in the decades between Stalin’s death and the union’s collapse.”

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Jan Burzlaff that reads: “What is lost when a political order is sustained not by conviction but by the slow routinization of participation?”] by @public_books

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2 days ago

“I’d like to take [Latiné Heritage Month] as an invitation to probe the notion of sovereignty not as a condition granted, but as a daily exercise in defense of freedom—its own kind of celebration and commemoration.”

New at PB: As Latiné Heritage Month comes to a close, Lily Balloffet (@doctora_lil) asks: What unites the nations and peoples represented in a "Heritage Month"? And what should we be celebrating?

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Lily Balloffet that reads: “I’ll be looking to set the stage for a Heritage Month dialogue with my students that highlights the themes of sovereignty and anti-imperialism.”] by @public_books

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4 days ago

“It's hard to get seen. It's hard to get reviewed. It's hard to get influencers on you. It's hard to get whatever it may take for a book to achieve the exit velocity that could have happened before.” (Will Evans)

New at PB: In the premiere of a special season of @novel_dialogue, @megireid and @willevans join @meshamaren to consider what makes up a literary ecosystem.

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Meg Reid that reads: “You can’t find a masthead for a big corporate publisher because it’s not about the people.”] by @public_books

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8 days ago

“The cardinal sin of ‘Tom’s Crossing’ is that it is more interesting as a conceptual object than as a text that must actually be read and experienced by the reader.”

New at PB: Max Lawton (@maxdaniellawton) reviews Mark Z. Danielewski’s “Tom’s Crossing.”

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Max Lawton that reads: “The book is an empty carapace, an enormous eggshell miraculously deprived of white and yolk.”] by @public_books

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9 days ago

“The Western myth of technocratic modernity asserts that humans have risen above nature through reason and control. … But in reality, a genuinely modern society … would have built systems that acknowledge the fundamental entanglement between humans, nonhumans, technologies, and environments.”

New at PB: Raffaele Sindoni asks what would it mean for a forest or a river to have the same rights as people. What if the law recognized the undeniable connection between humanity and nature?

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Raffaele Sindoni that reads: “Human representation for the nonhuman is not a fantasy. It has been commonplace for centuries.”] by @public_books

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10 days ago

“Cámara’s novel and Grandin’s history prompt us to reimagine the forms of politics and ethics that are possible if we teach and understand more capacious accounts of where we’ve been.”

New at PB: Nathan Motulsky considers the history of empire and the state of nature in a review of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s “We Are Green and Trembling” and Greg Grandin’s “America, América.”

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Nathan Motulsky that reads: “Anthropogenic climate change and its existential hazards reveal that the modern liberal order has been only one historically contingent world among many.”] by @public_books

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11 days ago

“By emphasizing Meursault’s identity as a Pied Noir, Ozon renders literal the label of ‘stranger’ and interrogates a settler’s capacity to fully integrate within their ‘chosen’ society and, toward the end of the film, their native one.”

New at PB: Viviana Freyer explores the inherent strangeness of settler colonialism in a review of François Ozon’s 2025 adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Viviana Freyer that reads: “While Camus opens the book with a specific moment in Meursault’s life, Ozon opens the film with Meursault’s specific moment in history.”] by @public_books

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12 days ago

"What started as a trip down memory lane revealed something deeper. Retro tech is not about nostalgia. It’s about resistance. Evading the technologies of capture, attention hacking, and dispossession.”

New at PB: Janet Vertesi argues for the radical possibilities of retro gaming.

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[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Janet Vertesi that reads: “It was a thrill to rediscover play as I was—as it was—in 1989.”] by @public_books

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15 days ago

“It’s not a conventional autobiography. It’s an attempt to tell a family history and, through it, to tell a bigger story of the Jewish community in Iraq in the first half of the 20th century.”

New at PB: Avi Shlaim, historian and influential scholar of Israel’s relationship with the Arab world, joins John Plotz and Yuval Evri to discuss class, caste differences, and destructive ethno-nationalist ideologies in mainstream Israeli politics.

Link in bio.

[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Avi Shlaim that reads: “Our move to Israel was not an ideological one… We were conscripted into the Zionist project.”] by @public_books

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16 days ago

“Beware to those who read ‘Adrift in the South’ solely as a cautionary tale about the Chinese state without considering the international flows of goods and power.”

New at PB: Michelle Chan Schmidt (@arghpoetica) reviews Xiao Hai’s memoir, “Adrift in the South” (@grantabooks), “as much a narrative of new Chinese workers as it is the emotional map of a young Henanese man’s coming-of-age.”

Link in bio.

[ID: 1. Text image of a quote from Michelle Chan Schmidt that reads: “For Xiao Hai … sublimity is not about making ends meet on 2000 yuan per month. Instead, it means poetry, nature, beauty.”] by @public_books

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17 days ago