From the Editors Archives - Public Seminar

Feminism

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

July 1, 2026 • by Rosa Campbell and Rachel Potter

Shere Hite’s goal was to bring feminism to the women in the suburbs she grew up in. To her conservative Christian grandmother who raised her; to her mother who fell pregnant with Hite as a teenager and was forced out of school; and to herself—an aspiring feminist academic who, without ...

Interviews

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

June 30, 2026 • by Gil Bittner and Carly Thomsen

In her forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly (University of California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen, a feminist and queer studies scholar, looks at how language deployed in the name of queerness and reproductive justice can end up reinforcing the very structures it is meant to challenge. She warns of “conservative outcomes” ...

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

Interviews

Practical Prison Abolition

An interview with Anna Terwiel on how thinking about justice in terms of personal experience can disrupt the belief that safety requires violent state intervention

June 23, 2026 • by Anna Terwiel and Madeline Trice

There are nearly two million people incarcerated in the United States. The idea of an end to the mass incarceration of those deemed criminal is perceived as far-fetched, naive, or unrealistic. But political scholar Anna Terwiel disagrees. In her new book, Prison Abolition for Realists (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), ...

Interviews

Writing Rooted in Community

June 11, 2026 • by Colette Estelle and Giada Scodellaro

Writing rarely ever comes from true solitude. That is the sentiment of author Giada Scodellaro, whose debut novel, Ruins, Child (New Directions, 2026) is a hybrid text on proximity, grief, growth, and kinship told through the interweaving stories of a community living in a dilapidated apartment complex. In a recent ...

Interviews

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

May 14, 2026 • by Cleo Levin and Megan Milks

Megan Milks’s portrait-in-essays Mega Milk (Feminist Press, 2026) has a straightforward premise: It’s a book about milk. But beneath the surface, it’s a multi-dimensional look at American dairy and all its associations. This collection is about transness, queerness, whiteness, family, farming, and much more. It takes the staid category of ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

May 12, 2026 • by Rida Chaudhry and Areeb Zuaiter

A decade ago, filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter was glued to her screen watching the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza when a different kind of video interrupted her feed: smiling young men laughing between backflips as bombs darkened the sky behind them. The Nablus-born documentarian was partly curious and partly enamored with ...

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

Interviews

Who’s the Boss?

In her new book, Beneath the Wage, Annie McClanahan offers an alternative history of service work that spans Pullman porters and Amazon Mechanical Turk clickworkers

April 27, 2026 • by Annie McClanahan and Lina Moe

Eighty percent of the US workforce now does service work, yet the protagonist that still anchors most histories of capitalism is the unionized, hourly, goods-producing manufacturing worker. In Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books/Princeton University Press, 2026), Annie McClanahan argues that this framing ...

Interviews

The Myth of Plastic Recycling

Judith Enck on the failures of US regulation and the grassroots movements demanding accountability in her new book, The Problem With Plastic

April 9, 2026 • by Judith Enck and Katya Wack

When a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, most people saw a news story about a toxic spill, a controlled burn, and a small town blanketed in chemical smoke. What far fewer realized was that the substance deliberately set on fire was vinyl chloride: the building ...

Interviews

Writing With One Eye Squinting at Doom

A conversation with Nancy Lemann on releasing her first novel in twenty years—and why she never stopped writing

March 31, 2026 • by Nancy Lemann and Coleson Smith

Nancy Lemann’s forthcoming novel, The Oyster Diaries (New York Review Books, 2026) is her first publication in over twenty years—and not for lack of trying. Despite the enduring appeal of her first two books—both set in New Orleans—The Lives of the Saints (1985) and The Ritz of the Bayou (1985), ...

Interviews

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

A conversation with author Dominic Pettman on how the phenomenon of ghosting is experienced in the modern age

March 26, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Dominic Pettman

Ghosting: when someone just stops replying to messages, stops returning calls, and for all intents and purposes vanishes without warning from your life. The term names the sudden ending of a relationship, through disappearance rather than a clear confrontation or closing act: It describes a mode of withdrawal by absence ...

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

Interviews

Fresh Hope for Labor

A conversation with labor historian Dave Kamper on the growing strength of American unions, as recounted in his new book, Who’s Got the Power?

March 12, 2026 • by Shea Dean and Dave Kamper

In his new book Who’s Got the Power? The Resurgence of American Unions (The New Press, 2025), labor writer and organizer Dave Kamper delivers a bit of good news in a dark time. “Much of the last half century has, for the labor movement, sucked beyond the telling,” he writes. ...

Interviews

The Return of the Oppressed

A conversation with Robert Fieseler on American Scare and the recovery of queer history long obscured by state censorship

March 11, 2026 • by Robert W. Fieseler and Katelyn Kimberlin

“I kept wondering why it felt like we were all living in the United States of Florida,” says Robert W. Fieseler. In his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (Penguin Random House, 2025), Fieseler examines the forces shaping the fastest-growing state in the ...

From the Editors

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

Practical Prison Abolition

An interview with Anna Terwiel on how thinking about justice in terms of personal experience can disrupt the belief that safety requires violent state intervention

Writing Rooted in Community

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

Who’s the Boss?

In her new book, Beneath the Wage, Annie McClanahan offers an alternative history of service work that spans Pullman porters and Amazon Mechanical Turk clickworkers

The Myth of Plastic Recycling

Judith Enck on the failures of US regulation and the grassroots movements demanding accountability in her new book, The Problem With Plastic

Writing With One Eye Squinting at Doom

A conversation with Nancy Lemann on releasing her first novel in twenty years—and why she never stopped writing

Fresh Hope for Labor

A conversation with labor historian Dave Kamper on the growing strength of American unions, as recounted in his new book, Who’s Got the Power?

The Return of the Oppressed

A conversation with Robert Fieseler on American Scare and the recovery of queer history long obscured by state censorship

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