Family Archives - Public Seminar

Health care

When the Young Lords and Black Panthers Occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx

How my father, the Panthers, and the Young Lords negotiated for the improved care that became the blueprint for the patient’s bill of rights

July 29, 2026 • by Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur

The below excerpt is taken from This Thug’s Life (Dafina, 2026), the first-ever insider account of the Shakur family, the iconic hip hop group T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., and the life and death Tupac Shakur—written by Mopreme Shakur, the legendary rapper’s big brother and eldest son of Black liberation activist Mutulu Shakur. In ...

When the Young Lords and Black Panthers Occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx

Kinships

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

In forging an interview, Lerner’s narrator must reckon with what an actual recording would have let him avoid

July 20, 2026 • by Elena Rotzokou

Anyone who has transcribed a conversation knows the strangeness of the result: Speech, once written down, often looks less intelligent than it sounded. Repetitions that carried rhythm become clutter; vulnerable hesitations become defects; interruptions that were the life of the exchange become punctuation problems. To transcribe is not to preserve ...

An Embarrassment of Exactness in Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Literature

The Garden of Wrath

An excerpt from The Oyster Diaries

March 31, 2026 • by Nancy Lemann

Maybe all families are alike on annual beach vacations. Tense. We used to go on an annual vacation with the in-laws to the Southern coast in August. Our destination was an island off the coast of South Carolina. I-95 was horrendous driving down from Washington on a Friday after work, the ...

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

Interviews

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, When All the Men Wore Hats

When the writing writes itself

November 20, 2025 • by Elizabeth Mirabelle and Susan Cheever

I met Susan Cheever at the Carl Schurz Park dog run, on the Upper East Side, to discuss her latest book, When All the Men Wore Hats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025). It’s her usual morning haunt: a place where she gives her beloved Corgi a bit of free-roaming exercise, ...

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, When All the Men Wore Hats

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Body & Mind

Mothers Resist!

Why communal care must be at the heart of feminism

September 12, 2025 • by Maggie Wyss

Privatized parenting asks individuals to do the work of a village and then punishes them when they can’t keep up....

Interviews

Generations of Women in The Witches of El Paso

“The rules are going to be broken”

December 11, 2024 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa and Luis Jaramillo

In his debut novel, The Witches of El Paso (Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books, 2024), Luis Jaramillo provides readers a sweeping multi-generational story about Nena, a woman living in World War II–era El Paso who begs for a new life and finds herself transported to colonial Mexico, where she ...

Generations of Women in The Witches of El Paso

Multi-Verse

Monica Youn on When “Euripides Meets Margaret Cho”

In Multi-Verse Episode 11, a son’s rejection meets a mother’s frenzy

October 2, 2023 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In Multi-Verse Episode 11, poet Monica Youn explores what it means to be depicted as an Asian "foreigner" in a Greek play....

Monica Youn on When “Euripides Meets Margaret Cho”

Migration

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Both political parties say they care about families—so why would the Biden administration return to a family separation regime?

April 19, 2023 • by Rachel Ida Buff

And yet, in the absence of new legislation that makes it easier to cross the border legally for work, the Biden administration has defaulted to a hard line on immigration that continues to separate families and promote border security. ...

The Violence of American Border Policies Continues

Feminism

There Can Be No Nonviolence in Human Gestation

Feminist scholar Sophie Lewis talks to Natasha Lennard about reproductive freedom and why we can embrace abortion as a form of killing

August 30, 2022 • by Natasha Lennard and Sophie Lewis

Even if all the people who currently “mother” in society were suddenly magically treated with respect by courts and medical doctors, left alone by cops and social workers, supported and assisted to become parents, and lavished with strings-free checks courtesy of the state, it would still be necessary to deprivatize ...