Excerpt Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

A Termination

An excerpt from A Termination by Honor Moore: a memoir about choice, loss, and identity

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore

He bends to look in.It comes to me now that right then, the gynecologist asks again if I want to do this, and I say yes. Did you waver? asks a voice in my head. I want to say no, and that is correct. I did not waver.Are you sure?Yes. ...

Sex & Gender

Walk Like a Loaded Man

An excerpt from The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men

June 5, 2023 • by Manuel Betancourt

Unlike the more straightforward concept of horniness (whose own mythic visual iconography is rife for analysis), thirst is more visceral, a physiological need....

Democracy

Putin’s Atom

An excerpt from Paul Josephson’s Nuclear Russia

April 26, 2023 • by Paul Josephson

The concept of preempting an enemy’s nuclear weapons that was a central point of Soviet military thought has been reiterated by President Vladimir Putin....

Literature

Year of the Rat

An excerpt from Marc Anthony Richardson’s experimental novel

April 5, 2023 • by Marc Anthony Richardson

... it had a semi-prehensile tail that nearly snaked a forearm like an opossum’s or a cat’s, but it was a gargantuan rat’s ......

History

Writing in Third Person

An excerpt from Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography

March 8, 2023 • by Enzo Traverso

Historical narration had to be anonymous and the historian undetectable lest they make their presence known in any way. ...

Art & Design

Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes

An excerpt of Interior Frontiers

March 7, 2023 • by Ann Stoler

This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...

Economy

Statistics as a Form of Knowledge

An excerpt from Quentin Bruneau’s States and the Masters of Capital

March 1, 2023 • by Quentin Bruneau

An excerpt from Quentin Bruneau's States and the Masters of Capital...

Finance

Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

January 9, 2023 • by Clara Mattei

Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...