Author and professor John Reed recounts how art world maven Alma Reed championed The New School’s Orozco murals amid a tense political climate, advocating educational and cultural liberation.
publicseminar.org/2026/04/alma...
“I don’t think any album, pop or otherwise, should require this much work to be conceptually legible.”
—Megan Robinson on Rosalía’s Lux and its shortcomings.
publicseminar.org/2026/04/revi...
“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...