“Close attention reinforces skepticism about general matters, such as the purpose of life. It also allows us to understand just a bit about how other creatures think and feel.” —Peter Levine reflects on teaching skepticism in occupied Palestine and Ukraine. publicseminar.org/2026/04/teac...

“I wanted to stage a scenario where I could explore a certain question, which has interested me for some time: How do we relate to people who have harmed us?” —Larissa Pham in conversation with Jacqueline LeKachman on her new novel, Discipline. publicseminar.org/2026/02/lari...

“Has Israel not made a mockery of the rule of law? How can one look to international humanitarian law (IHL) as an effective way to deal with Israel’s decades-long occupation?“ – Coleson Smith on Francesca Albanese’s When the World Sleeps (Other Press, 2026) publicseminar.org/2026/04/revi...

“For years, you ignored your cousin’s displaced nationalism and imperial nostalgia to maintain peace in a group chat.” —M. B. Molavi on how war has exposed faultlines in the Iranian diaspora. publicseminar.org/2026/04/war-...

As peace talks between the US and Iran fail and the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and Gaza continue, we return to an essay from last April by Emmanuel Guerisoli on Israel’s reach for hegemony through what Guerisoli calls the “Gazification” of the Middle East. publicseminar.org/2025/04/isra...

“Any innovations, AI-related or otherwise, that overreach in relieving us of the need to confront the dissonance of each other’s viewpoints risk draining democracy’s lifeblood.” —Alice Crary on longterminism, AI ethics and democracy. publicseminar.org/2026/04/phil...

Iman Sultan reviews Stephanie LaCava’s Nymph, which follows a twenty-first century flaneuse as she navigates a world in which the objectified female body becomes a site of surveillance. publicseminar.org/2026/04/revi...

Political journalism: What is it good for? Writers and editors from Lux, n+1, Acacia, Hell Gate, and This Machine Kills discuss the mechanics and stakes of their work amidst a media landscape in violent flux. publicseminar.org/2026/04/publ...

“I’ve always felt that as a writer, you can learn as much, if not more, from books as you can from life.”—Nancy Lemann chats with Coleson Smith about her new novel, The Oyster Diaries, and a 20-year publishing dry spell. @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2026/03/inte...

“People could always just disappear, of course, but I think one of the key sentences in the book is, ‘as soon as we invented texting, we invented not texting.’” —Dominic Pettman speaking with Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg about his new book, Ghosting: On Disappearing publicseminar.org/2026/03/ghos...

“Can it be made to imitate or produce virtuosity? I don’t care. This is not about an individual talent vs. an LLM. It’s about a collective population vs. tech and the Pentagon.” —Elvia Wilk on generative AI’s threat to labor rights and solidarity. publicseminar.org/2026/03/stop...

As the International Olympic Committee bans transgender athletes from participating in women’s Olympic categories, we return to Amelia Nonemacher’s argument that any trans advocacy based solely on the trans population’s relatively small size is deeply inadequate. publicseminar.org/2025/04/the-...

“Unlike the endless scroll of social media or streaming services, physical media forces you to make intentional choices about the things you want to share your space with.” — Eva Szilardi-Tierney on the resurgence of physical media among queer artists publicseminar.org/2026/03/quee...

The viral ‘Everything Shower’ promises self-liberation through a multi-step, ritualized self-care routine. Spanning Across Mormonism to luxury day spas, Drew Vogelsang discusses the social currencies, consequences, and histories of the trend. publicseminar.org/2026/03/ever...

“Because I wrote an optimistic book, I’m going to give an optimistic take on a very difficult situation.” —Dave Kamper speaking with Shea Dean on the current US labor movement, as told in his new book, Who’s Got the Power? publicseminar.org/2026/03/inte...

“I kept wondering why it felt like we were all living in the United States of Florida.” —Robert Fieseler discussing his latest book, American Scare, with Katelyn Kimberlin. publicseminar.org/2026/03/inte...

Award-winning Photographer Nancy Richards Farese captures the humanitarian crisis in Przemyśl, Poland, four years into the Russo-Ukrainian war and considers America’s identity after USAID shutdown. publicseminar.org/2026/03/usai...

“Rage has long been my normal state, but I had recently decided that impotent anger was no longer morally or politically sufficient: I had to do something.” —Mitchell Abidor on protective presence activism in the West Bank. publicseminar.org/2026/03/prot...

“The innocent child is both a fantasy and a concealment of violence.” —Alexandra Magearu on the idealized child versus the reality of childhoods filled with violence and displacement. publicseminar.org/2026/03/chil...

Nate Masso reviews New York’s first Gaza Biennale, “a global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists working under a genocidal siege that places creative expression at the forefront of collective witnessing.” publicseminar.org/2026/03/the-...

“It became clear that roads and homes in Palestine were not only typical sites of domination–colonizer upon colonized–they were also zones of contestation between colonizer (British) and colonizer (Zionist).” –Chris Harding on Palestine’s Great Revolt. publicseminar.org/2026/03/cann...

“The apocalypse, in Majumdar’s world, arrives not with spectacle but with changes in government paperwork and individuals’ everyday errands and habits.” —Katya Wack on Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief publicseminar.org/2026/02/love...

“Siken attempts to recover his language, body, and memory in an intensely autobiographical book of prose poems that is electrifying and difficult to read.” —Rayna Salam reviews Richard Siken's long-awaited poetry collection I Do Know Some Things. publicseminar.org/2026/02/revi...

New York recently became the 13th state to legalize medically assisted death. Such laws are often celebrated as wins for patient autonomy, but, as Megan Robinson writes, they can also act as a poor replacement for better healthcare and social services. publicseminar.org/2026/02/medi...

In an excerpt from her new book, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine: A Philosophy of Addiction, Hanna Pickard explores how “addict” and “ex-addict” identities influence a person’s drug use. publicseminar.org/2026/02/exce...

Val Vinokur’s fourth installment in his poetry series The Ostriches brings us to da Vinci’s jail-breaking machines and the prison cells of 26 Federal Plaza in New York. publicseminar.org/2026/02/the-...

“For those of us who’ve never been to space, the reality of Earth’s vulnerability can be harder to hold onto. The way its beauty is inseparable from its vulnerability.” —Laurie Sheck on what we learn from the view from outer space publicseminar.org/2026/02/some...

“Due to North Korea’s political isolation, women’s football is one of the very few areas in which the country can display excellence to international audiences.” — Jung Woo Lee on how socialist feminism begat soccer stardom in the DPRK publicseminar.org/2026/02/femi...

“These days, I’m not sure that a sense of impending doom is a symptom of anything other than a proper perception of reality.” — Arthur Goldhammer on the inevitable consequences of “American impunity” publicseminar.org/2026/01/thin...

“What if [Renee] Good had the moral right to resist? Could she have been justified in noncompliance, even if she had hypothetically used potentially deadly force against the agents to defend herself?” —Michael Gregory on the morality of self-defense against ICE publicseminar.org/2026/01/the-...

Journalist Suzy Hansen explains the urgency behind her new magazine, Equator, co-created with Pankaj Mishra, Nesrine Malik, and Mohsin Hamid. Speaking with Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg, Hansen discusses shattering American innocence and the failures of Western media. publicseminar.org/2025/12/find...

“Becoming computational is not a unitary phenomenon.” - Benjamin Mangrum, discussing The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence with Rayna Salam. @stanfordpress.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/12/the-...

“Ethics stand no chance in the face of jealousy.” — Paolo Sorrentino on his new film, La Grazia, in an exclusive Public Seminar interview with Mitchell Abidor. publicseminar.org/2025/12/paol...

“Chief among the book’s documentary achievements is its laying out of the breadth of the devastation wrought by the Israeli government and its (mostly) Western enablers.” —Coleson Smith reviews Gaza: The Story of a Genocide @versobooks.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/11/revi...

70 years after Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Bennett Parten shares a genealogy of social protest: “Nonviolent resistance, after all, is a twentieth-century version of what many American abolitionists knew as simply “nonresistance.” publicseminar.org/2025/11/gene...

"If the average American thinks a Super Bowl halftime show tests the limits of cultural comfort, the 2026 World Cup will be something else entirely." —Sean Jacobs and Ivan Pech Luna on a tournament that promises to shake up US soccer. @seanjacobs.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/11/eigh...

“This was not the chaos of war. This was the systematic destruction of the infrastructure that keeps women alive.” —Urgent writing from Ayotunde Giwa on the geopolitical calculations leaving Sudan's women exposed to sexual violence and genocide. publicseminar.org/2025/12/geno...

“What fascism offers is the promise of pleasure and the promise of a sense of superiority.” —Dagmar Herzog chats w Adam Koehler Brown about her latest book, The New Fascist Body. @nssrnews.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/11/new-...

“Back in my teenage years, I was a terrible writer but ended up becoming a pretty good writer. So I know it can be taught.” —Susan Cheever chats w Elizabeth Mirabelle about letting the writing “take over” in her new book @nssrnews.bsky.social @fsgbooks.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/11/susa...

Mariam Matar reviews Naguib Mahfouz's posthumous story collection I Found Myself … The Last Dreams, which maps that liminal space where language, longing, and the city converge. @nssrnews.bsky.social @ndbooks.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/11/nagu...

"I Found Myself … The Last Dreams creates a space somewhere above and beyond the carceral structures that dominate the Egyptian sociopolitical landscape." —Mariam Matar on a new Naguib Mahfouz collection that maps Cairo through dreams. @ndbooks.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/11/nagu...

“With each restaffing of the executive suite, the studios seem to arrive at the same conclusion: Better invest in a small number of blockbusters than a wider array of mid-budget movies.” —Amelia Nonemacher on the shortcomings of the summer blockbuster system publicseminar.org/2025/11/good...

On the 20th anniversary of that debate, I wrote about that line from the debate for @publicseminar.bsky.social. publicseminar.org/essays/why-b...

"What’s changed since the days of the Holland Tunnel’s construction isn’t just the escalation of zoning wars and NIMBYism in US cities and suburbs.” —Achilles Kallergis on Klein and Thompson's ABUNDANCE and the tug-of-war over who gets to build where in housing a crisis. bit.ly/497F8RP

“I hate to canvass. My hatred of it is precisely why I chose to do it: There’s nothing meritorious in donating money if you can do something you hate as proof, if only to yourself, of your serious commitment.” — Mitchell Abidor on how Mamdani’s big dreams drew him publicseminar.org/2025/10/canv...

"Shakespeare, according to Voltaire, offered only an 'obscure Chaos, composed of Murders and Buffooneries.'” —Sophia Charles charts how French critics went from treating Shakespeare as hack to revering him as a genius over the course of a century of social upheaval publicseminar.org/2025/10/shak...

"To treat Mamdani’s membership in the DSA as a threat to Western civilization is absurd. New York is a city where a single chocolate chip cookie costs seven dollars! Radical change is needed here." —Mitchell Abidor goes door-knocking for the #mamdani campaign publicseminar.org/2025/10/canv...

"Is drawing on Romanticism’s bequest, with its emphasis on the individual and its dregs of inward spirituality, the right model for reconciliation?" —@sarahvschweig.bsky.social on Charles Taylor's COSMIC CONNECTIONS @nssrnews.bsky.social @harvardpress.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/10/poet...

Poet Wendy Xu chats with @armando-gabriel.bsky.social about challenging the expectations of documentary writing in her new book, YOUR HISTORICAL LOVELINESS KNOWS NO BOUNDS, out now with @uofmpress.bsky.social @nssrnews.bsky.social @newschoolalumni.bsky.social publicseminar.org/2025/10/anim...

"Digital 'prospecting' evokes a long history of outsiders extracting knowledge and artifacts without consent." —Annie K. Lamar and Sarah B. McClure on an "Indiana Jones–style" treasure hunt sponsored by OpenAI. publicseminar.org/2025/10/ai-i...