“How can a country tackle the monumental task of political transformation when its people are surviving only thanks to remittances and, as I hear many say, the grace of God?”

In the latest installment in our partnership with @casbsstanford.bsky.social, author and scholar @ninabandelj.bsky.social is in conversation with Caitlin Zaloom about how and when children became investment projects to manage.

“Needing to invest has become so tightly linked with being a good parent that the parents we talked to were quite silent about the idea that the state, for instance, might shoulder more of the growing costs.”

“Who had lived here? Did they survive? Where did they go? The same buildings sometimes present questions about return.” New at PB: @wendy-pearlman.bsky.social has spent nearly 15 years researching Syria. Last year, she visited for the first time.

“I am inhabiting many different identities, sometimes multiple identities, constantly. I feel that I'm definitely building on a legacy of Latin American literature and Latino literature in the United States.”

“How do norms and institutions need to change for this intimate experience of exhausted parenting to change?” New at PB: @ninabandelj.bsky.social on the “emotional economy” of parenting.

“Spanglish has no real rules. It's more about sound and how things feel.” New at PB: In the Season 4 finale of “Writing Latinos,” Julián Delgado Lopera discusses the writing of his new book “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” (@liveright.bsky.social).

New at PB: Founding editor Caitlin Zaloom interviews author and scholar @ninabandelj.bsky.social about her new book “Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting” (@princetonupress.bsky.social), the latest installment in our partnership with @casbsstanford.bsky.social.

“Sometimes, the presence of this tortured homeland was haunting and traumatic. Sometimes, it was nostalgic and cherished. Often, it was both.” New at PB: @wendy-pearlman.bsky.social on the return of displaced Syrians to their homeland.

“It's through the revision process that I blend [English and Spanish] together for sound, for understanding.”

“If the country was integral to my own work, life, and identity, I had to come face-to-face with it.” @wendy-pearlman.bsky.social began to research Syria at the outset of its popular uprising. In 2025, she visited Syria for the first time.

For Writing Latinos, host @geraldo-cadava.bsky.social talks with author Julián Delgado Lopera about his new book “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” (@liveright.bsky.social) and what he describes as “Travesti Lore” & the “sacred travesti gospel.”

“‘Walk down the street,’ he told me. ‘You can immediately distinguish between those who never left Syria and those who just came back.’”

“Reliance on these companies and their platforms may, however, deepen the usurpation of humanitarian actors by corporate-owned and operated services.”

In late 2024, after the Assad regime fell, displaced Syrians began to trickle, then stream, home. @wendy-pearlman.bsky.social visited the country for the first time in 2025 to meet in person some of the many people she had interviewed over the years.

Iván Chaar López & @erinmcel.bsky.social take on the assumptions in Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin’s PPI critique “The Distortion of American Studies.”

“What they should know—and we must remember—is that the actual error with the field is how the boundedness of the object of study (‘America’) was an assumed truth, rather than a question.”

New at PB: Aaron Martin & Quito Tsui argue against “platform humanitarianism.”

“Maps and words can’t hold everything.” New at PB: Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera on Edward Said, Ireland, and the problem of home.

“Many of these tools require or enable the collection of vast amounts of data, tracking and tracing the movement and decisions of those interacting with humanitarian assistance.”

“How are we supposed to maintain “redemption” in the sustained exercise of settler colonialism or structural violence? How are fair-minded accounts realized? Redemption and fair-mindedness for whom? Who benefits?”

“What kind of humanitarianism will emerge from this momentous upheaval?” New at PB: Aaron Martin (@sixfouronea.net) & Quito Tsui consider the effects the ascendancy of generative AI platforms will have on humanitarian networks.

“What Said recognized about Ireland—cultural gifts, intellectual leaders, committed people—are applicable beyond a single colonized island because they are human strengths, repeatable in example.”

“We question the ‘study’s’ purpose in a time of institutional capture by political actors that prohibit independent inquiry and dissent.” New at PB: Iván Chaar López & @erinmcel.bsky.social on Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin’s critique of American Studies.

“We have to stop being in a crouch, stop hoping that our inaction and silence will protect us from fascist chaos and state violence.”

“Humanitarian organizations need to rethink their relationship to tech, be less deferential to corporate execs pitching their wares, and recover their duties as a platform for human dignity.”

“I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society.” Durba Mitra (@durba.bsky.social) in conversation with Emma Heaney (@riislover667.bsky.social) on “The Future That Was.”

In a response to Kahlenberg & Lin’s critique “The Distortion of American Studies,” Iván Chaar López & Erin McElroy argue that the “balance” they find missing in the field “is but a hollow attempt to tilt the balance against those who dare to speak truth to power.”

“Corcaíoch Irish Republican Michael Collins (my father and eldest son’s namesake) believed that before insurmountable power and violence, our only weapon is refusal.”

This week, as the UN holds its annual Humanitarian Affairs Segment in New York, Aaron Martin (@sixfouronea.net) & Quito Tsui urge humanitarian organizations to break away from their reliance on private technology.

“Hard to believe that over two decades later, a single paragraph can maintain the same power, force, and relevance to one’s existence.” New at PB: Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera on Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile.”

New at PB: Aaron Martin (@sixfouronea.net) & Quito Tsui argue that if humanitarian aid organizations continue to embrace big tech, they will only be powering the surveillance empire opposed to their goals.

“Otherwise, we should rename the field to ‘American exceptionalism studies.’ And not be ambivalent about it. ” New at PB: Iván Chaar López & @erinmcel.bsky.social take on recent critiques of American studies.

“Women enter the scene of internationalism and confront the alienation and disillusionment that people feel after being burned by the project of state politics.”

“Where they insist on sugarcoating or entertaining vague notions of ‘balance,’ we stay with the trouble of dreams deferred.”

“An entire world of thousands of women from around the globe engaged in a project of knowledge production by and for the state.” @durba.bsky.social on the women who incorporated global comparative measures of development into state practice.

“The emptiness of exile is part of a design: worlds are planned, people in them are excluded.” As governments create new worlds of exile, the words of Edward Said are more important than reave. Read Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera’s reflection, new at PB.

Iván Chaar López & @erinmcel.bsky.social respond to Kahlenberg & Lin’s critique “The Distortion of American Studies.” Their “‘study’ questions the contributions and merits of a whole scholarly field without the rigor of engaging its insights.”

In 1931, Mildred Harnack’s student Karl Behrens dropped out of the Sturmabteilung and joined Harnack’s “Circle” of resistance. Lauren Arrington reminds us we have all the proof we need “that every person might choose—at any moment—to refuse.”

“Said's ‘Reflections on Exile’ summoned to mind the only seven words my grandfather ever said to me about Ireland, where he had cousins he never knew: ‘I don’t think I’ll go back there.’”

“I wanted to write a history of what happened when women entered the domain of knowledge production.” In conversation with @riislover667.bsky.social, @durba.bsky.social discusses how she found “an archive of excess” for the history of Third World feminism.

“The manipulation of election results; control of the media; control of the courts; cooption of universities, schools, and libraries; alliance with Christian nationalism … : this is the pattern that Mildred Harnack saw play out around her.”

New at PB: Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera reflects on exile through the words of Edward Said, James Joyce, and through the story of his grandfather, whose life took him from Ireland to Massachusetts to Puerto Rico.

“The books by Horowitz and Rothaus illuminate what is at stake in these disputes by revealing how deeply football and local political power remain intertwined.” New at PB: A review of two new books on the history of football in Argentina. www.publicbooks.org/who-owns-arg...

“When I was teaching the history of decolonization, I found myself thinking, How do we understand feminist epistemologies in this history?”

New at PB: @riislover667.bsky.social interviews @durba.bsky.social about her new book “The Future That Was” (@princetonupress.bsky.social), the vital history of Third World feminism, and the place of feminist visions for the future in our world now.

The World Cup began last week, and community and capitalism collide. In a review of two new books, Nicolás Campisi shows how Argentina’s first clubs “openly embrac[ed] anarchist principles in both their organizational structures and their spirit.”

“The politicization of universities was just one aspect of the control of intellectual life in the country.” New at PB: Lauren Arrington discusses two books on institutions in Nazi Germany.

In the latest episode of Writing Latinos, @aditaferrer.bsky.social and @geraldo-cadava.bsky.social discuss craft, history, and the writing of “Keeper of My Kin” (@scribnerbooks.bsky.social).

In a new book by Tomas Rothaus from, the author shows his journey to anarchist sympathies and football fandom in Argentina. His story embodies “the contradictions of modern urban life, caught between the competing demands of community and commerce.”