“We need not imagine what Arendt would have had to say about Israel’s crimes against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Gazan people—because we already know.”

“Some hospitals still sterilized patients against their will as the price for agreeing to offer an abortion.” Karen Weingarten reminds us of Lawrence Lader’s book “Abortion,” the first book to make a case for repealing all abortion laws.

“The film doubles down in systematically approving intimate partner violence (IPV). Kale is loudly critical of Ashley, implying that she has weak judgment about people and social norms.” Eleanor Johnson on the horror of DV—in film and real life.

“Arendt’s refusal of 'love for the Jewish people' is a startlingly radical and highly potent response to the ethnonationalism that in 2025 comes in both antisemitic and philosemitic flavors—which sometimes blend together with surprising ease.”

“He pitched a long-form article that would present his research on the impact of anti-abortion laws to show the harm they caused. No editor was willing.” New at PB: Larry Lader’s 1966 “Abortion” turned the tide on abortion activism. Could that ever happen again?

“Instead of feeling worried about Ashley, and instead of seeing Kale as a criminal and predator, Disturbia encourages us to celebrate their relationship and to think of him as the hero.” New at PB: Eleanor Johnson on DV and horror films:

“Nineteenth-century anti-abortion rhetoric framed abortion as unnatural or as interfering with (white) women’s moral duty to reproduce for the state. Despite these restrictions, however, abortion did not go away.”

“The ‘natality’ that brings each thinking being into the world with a different outlook from that of any other being is what makes protecting the rights of each so indispensable.” New at PB: John Plotz on Arendt’s universalism that respects difference.

“Still, all this was—and is—part of the incomprehensible commotion: the pleasure of not understanding.”

“I support films that cause us to encounter the vulnerability and harm done to people, whether as individuals or as classes. Indeed, this is precisely what I value about horror films: that they enable us to feel someone else’s vulnerability as our own.”

New at PB: In a review of Diane Seuss’s “Modern Poetry,” Jonathan Elmer talks about the pleasure of disliking poetry.

New at PB: John Plotz explores Hannah Arendt’s often-overlooked wartime essay, “We Refugees” (1943), in which Arendt envisions a universalism that is nonetheless cautious about assimilation as shape-shifting.

The 1966 book “‘Abortion’ proclaimed loudly that all abortion laws should be repealed, that there was no shame in seeking an abortion, and that without legal abortion women would never be free.”

“Faced with an American society that for all its political freedom still rejects social nonconformity, Arendt urges refugees to be conscious pariahs, not Disraeli-like infiltrators: Beat them, don’t join them.”

“Doctors saw firsthand how anti-abortion laws killed, maimed, and emotionally destroyed women who couldn’t have safe and legal abortions.”

New at PB: John Plotz puzzles out what seems like a contradiction in Hannah Arendt's work: reconciling her enlightenment universalism with her reflections on the deceptiveness, or even the impossibility, of disavowing one’s ethnic or religious origins.

“Now you may go continue to be a predator elsewhere on your own recognizance.” So ends the 2007 film Disturbia, starring Shia LaBeouf. Going on to become a predator is exactly what he did. New at PB: Eleanor Johnson on Disturbia & all too real domestic violence.

“Reader’s Digest excerpted 8 pages. This thrust Lader into the limelight, turning him from a journalist into an abortion activist almost overnight.” New at PB: The 1966 book that changed the landscape of Abortion activism.

“Stalking is a form of violence against women. And not only because it’s repeatedly been shown to be a risk factor for other forms of violence and assault; it’s a crime on its own terms, because it’s a categorical violation of privacy and bodily autonomy.”

“Before Lader’s book, no one, it seemed, wanted to talk about abortion publicly. But something changed with the 1966 'Abortion.'” New at PB: In our post-Roe age, Karen Weingarten explores a forgotten book from 1966 that once made cultural change.

“Through one family crisis after another—even the final catastrophe—the novel’s refrain is ‘we always thought that everything in the end was going to be all right.’” New at PB: Adela Pinch on child narrators.

It's the perfect season to watch a horror film. But, writes Eleanor Johnson, “we have absolutely got to stop making films that condone predatory behavior.”

New at PB: Eleanor Johnson uses the 2007 film Disturbia to argue against the genre of horror films that frames abusers as heroes.

“In both of my novels, if there is an antagonist, it’s often the nation itself. I’m really interested in how the fractures of the nation make their way into domestic spaces, be it family life or marriage.”

“Rebecca West is master of that cat-like sentence structure. Her sentences are both sinuous and off-kilter, and very often very funny.”

New at PB: Nishant Batsha on the historical cognates of the characters in his new novel “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart.”

“More than anything, what we need to take from ‘Gaslight’ now is the plot-deciding importance of speaking truth to power, of practicing radical solidarity, and of keeping our eyes, always, on the light.”

“But at bottom they remain insanely resilient. It is ‘humiliating’ being a child (‘adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise’); it is fantastic being a child.” New at PB: Adela Pinch on the child narrator of Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows.”

In our time of the Gaslighter in Chief, the term “gaslighting” is nearly ubiquitous. Its origins in the film and stage versions are well known; but a recently uncovered lost version sheds new light on the meaning of the term, and what we should take away from it.

Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows” tells the story of the Aubrey family—highly educated, long-struggling—through the eyes of its children. West, argues Adela Pinch, “holds together the double vision of the Aubrey children’s world.”

“I think you can make a distinction between historical fiction versus fiction that engages with the past. I am much more of the latter. I don’t see my works of fiction as having a pedagogical impulse to educate the reader about the past.”

“The Fountain Overflows is a tour de force of child narration, able to capture the child’s ability simultaneously to normalize difficult circumstances and to convey awareness of the unconventional chaos of her life.”

“It was a monumental undertaking to make this an American book. To be an American book means, to me, to think about the vastness of social experience from wildly different groups of people.” Nishant Batsha on writing an American novel:

“We’ve been trained to think of gaslighting as a form of psychological violence that’s almost impossible to resist. And we believe this, in part, because accounts of the term’s origins so often describe the set-up but not the resolution of the Gaslight plot.”

Do you find child narrators–their perceptiveness as well as their misprisions, their loyalties, their prejudices–endlessly absorbing? Read on for Adela Pinch’s recommendation of her favorite child narrator:

“The document’s brief description of the ending of the ‘original English play’ stunned me. This was not the ending of the ‘Gas Light’ script I knew so well by that point.” New at PB: @noragilbert.bsky.social uncovers a lost version of the film Gaslight.

New at PB: In the latest B-Side, Adela Pinch revisits Rebecca West's “The Fountain Overflows,” the “best evocation of an unconventional early 20th-century childhood” she has ever read. www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-rebe...

Nishant Batsha is a scholar-turned-novelist. Is there tension, @jennybhattwriter.bsky.social asks, in troubling historical accuracy? “I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story."

“Every single character, from the most major to those with the briefest of appearances, has an actual historical cognate whom I researched by reading quite widely in primary and secondary sources.”

Among plays and films there are four different versions of “Gaslight,” perhaps the most famous being the MGM film version from 1944 starring Ingrid Bergman. Or at least we thought there were only 4. New at PB, Nora Gilbert uncovers a lost version:

“In both of my novels, if there is an antagonist, it’s often the nation itself.” New at PB: @jennybhattwriter.bsky.social interviews author Nishant Batsha about his new novel "A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart."

Happy to have this new piece out in @publicbooks.bsky.social today about political #gaslighting, a lost version of the play #Gaslight, and how the latter can help us reframe the way we think about and push back against the former!

“Perhaps the most deliciously empowering scene of pushback, though, doesn’t appear in any of the versions of ‘Gaslight’ that are currently accessible.”

In 2023, @noragilbert.bsky.social uncovered a synopsis of a lost version of "Gaslight" in the MGM archives. This version's different ending is a lesson in radical solidarity—and, Gilbert argues, it should change the way we think of "gaslighting" as a term.

“The novels form screeds against contemporaries, against artists who have occupied themselves with aesthetics ways different from his own.” New at PB: Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian on the screeds—both bonkers and convincing—of Giorgio de Chirico’s novels.

“Strickland’s ‘I’ll Be Back!’ opens and closes with Makandal’s 'radical powers of metamorphosis'… Makandal, who evaded colonial control in life, now—it was said—evades colonial punishment in death, transforms into an insect, and slips away.”

“Myth is always there imbuing our ordinary lives with meaning, but I find that myth is always rendered somewhat ridiculous at the same time. There will be some kind of expansive mythic moment of imagining, say, a dragon—and then the dragon is just a lizard.”

“The paintings of Magritte and Dalí were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes.” Giorgio de Chirico was a pillar of modernist painting; & then he renounced it. What can we learn about his art from his writing & vice versa?

“Caught between the harsh novelty of colonial rule and the unwelcoming jungle, Silindu is trapped in a fatalistic universe from which there is no respite.” New at PB: Priyasha Mukhopadhyay on “The Village in the Jungle.”

“The film simultaneously introduces the means to reclaim, repurpose, and reimagine the violence of the archive: research.”