Interviews Archives - Page 6 of 11

Interviews

Making Poetry Fun and Daring

An interview with award-winning poet Victoria Chang

July 13, 2022 • by Victoria Chang and Nomaris García Rivera

Victoria Chang is a Chinese American poet whose writing explores themes of death and grief. In her new book The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) Chang explores how we experience grief over time, and how nature experiences it along with us. Informed by the pandemic, the theme of ...

Interviews

When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

Anthropologist Ruth Behar discusses writing across genres, making ideas accessible, and a new children’s book

July 6, 2022 • by Ruth Behar and Reeva Dani

Behar spoke with Public Seminar about writing for young readers, how people and their stories are intertwined in both fiction and anthropology, and the importance of telling stories with ethnographic accuracy....

When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

History

How to Become a Queer Historian

An interview with San Francisco State University scholar-activist Marc Stein

June 1, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Marc Stein

Marc Stein is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where he teaches U.S. law, politics, sexuality, gender, race, and social movements. He’s also an old friend: we met when Marc was in graduate school and I was starting my career as a visiting professor at The University of ...

Interviews

The Future of Working from Home

Urban economist Matthew Kahn thinks the pandemic lockdown could change your life—for the better

May 23, 2022 • by Claire Potter and Matthew Kahn

The stubborn persistence of remote work will increasingly be on the national agenda. On April 28, 2022, Airbnb announced a new policy that would “allow employees to live and work anywhere,” and that they would partner with potential destinations “to help them attract remote workers.” Differently, New York Magazine’s Jen ...

Interviews

Towards Constructive Politics

What oppression is, at the end of the day, is a world that has been built in a bad way

May 23, 2022 • by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Matene Toure

It just isn’t true that the only problem that confronts people who are trying to learn the truth about their social system is that they haven’t talked to enough people who have less money than them, or a more marginalized racial or gender identity. That’s among the problems, but the ...

Interviews

A Hotbed of Anarchism and Clam Pasta

Labor organizing and espionage in Joseph Matthews’s new novel, The Blast

May 18, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

There was a great variety of tremendously active Left formations in San Francisco in 1916, and I wanted to explore that variety within the context of the novel....

Interviews

Singing America’s Racial History

A conversation with historian Emily Bingham about Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home”

May 6, 2022 • by Emily Bingham and Claire Potter

May 7, 2022, is the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby, nicknamed “The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.” Before these three-year-old thoroughbreds burst out of the starting gate, thousands of people will don elaborate hats, drink mint juleps, and—right before the race, accompanied by the University of Louisville marching band—sing Steven ...

Interviews

The Nitty-Gritty of Craft

A conversation with writer Mychal Denzel Smith

April 20, 2022 • by Mychal Denzel Smith and Erica Marrison

“Coming off of a decade or so—oh God, this year marks 12 years since I first published—of thinking about the worst things that happened to Black people in the United States, I just wanted some pleasure in my life,” says writer Mychal Denzel Smith from his balcony in Brooklyn. Smith’s most recent ...

Interviews

The Promise and Perils of Life in Outer Space

A conversation with architect Fred Scharmen

April 19, 2022 • by Emma Celebrezze and Fred Scharmen

I got really obsessed with these paintings from a NASA project that was about designing giant, free-floating, spinning cities to orbit Earth. I decided to take them seriously as real proposals that were in the lineage of architecture and urban design. What I found was that far from being this ...

The Promise and Perils of Life in Outer Space

Interviews

Does Time Pass or, Do We Pass the Time?

Lisa Hsiao Chen explores what it is that keeps us going

April 13, 2022 • by Shweta Nandakumar and Lisa Hsiao Chen

Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living examines the interconnections between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time. Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this is a vivid, and tender examination of the ...

Interviews

Dismantling Truths About Emerging Adulthood

A conversation with Rainesford Stauffer: Breaking down the structural challenges behind living your #BestLife

April 12, 2022 • by Rainesford Stauffer and Shivani Somaiya

We need a really radical re-imagining of, not just how we think about young adulthood, but how we move through our lives and where we find value. I would want people to know that this myth of young adulthood is not your individual burden. Doing the best you can within ...

Dismantling Truths About Emerging Adulthood

Interviews

AI Remains Unchecked: A Conversation With Patrick K. Lin

How technology can mirror biases in our criminal justice system

March 23, 2022 • by Patrick K. Lin and Miko Yoshida

The diversity of faces used to train an algorithm can influence the kinds of photos and faces that an algorithm is most adept at examining. If the set of face images is skewed towards a certain race, the algorithm may be better at identifying members of that group as compared ...