Public Books 101

Public Books 101

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Public Books 101 episodes

  • Novels and Intimacy (with Garth Greenwell & Daniel Wright)

    Novelist Garth Greenwell and scholar Daniel Wright join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels expand our understanding of sex and intimacy in the digital age.

     

    In our image-saturated culture, it can be easy to fixate on a surface while overlooking the consciousness—the thinking, feeling subject—under the (pixelated) skin. How can novels, like Barbara Browning’s The Gift, remind us that bodies are, well, embodied?

     

    You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

    1 hr 6 min
  • Novels and Political Consciousness (with Elif Batuman & Merve Emre)

    Novelist Elif Batuman and scholar Merve Emre join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels help us develop an awareness of capitalism, power, and the world we live in. In making pain beautiful, do novels depoliticize us? Or can a novel like Sakaya Murata's Convenience Store Woman help us figure out what freedom looks like? 

    You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

    1 hr
  • Novels and Ideas (with Teju Cole & Tara Menon)

    Novelist Teju Cole and scholar Tara Menon join our host, Nicholas Dames, to consider how novels inspire readers to wrestle with difficult ideas. From Shelley's Frankenstein to Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, how have novels helped us think more ethically about the world we inhabit?

     

    You can find complete show notes here and purchase books from our independent-bookshop partner, Harvard Book Store, here.

     

     

    1 hr 23 min
  • Introducing Season 2: The Novel Now
    In the age of Twitter, TikTok, and streaming TV, why are people still turning to the novel, a centuries-old cultural technology?   Season 2 of Public Books 101 is hosted by Nicholas Dames, a cultural critic, professor of English, and editor in chief of Public Books. Nick joins novelists, scholars, and medical doctors to explore [...]

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    3 min
  • Silicon Valley and Beyond (with Meredith Broussard & Margaret O’Mara)
    How did Silicon Valley become such a historically and globally significant hub of technological innovation? What—and who—gets left out of the stories people tell about Silicon Valley? What are the limits of technology, and how can we create more equitable technologies for the future?   Guests: Meredith Broussard is a data journalist, an associate professor [...]

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    54 min
  • Cultures Online (with Lauren Michele Jackson & Richard Jean So)
    What new cultural forms are developing in the vast universe of the internet? How can observers and scholars keep up with the accelerated pace of human creativity online? And how do racial aesthetics, money, and power play out in internet cultures?   Guests: Lauren Michele Jackson teaches in the departments of English and African American [...]

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    55 min
  • Societies Online: Privacy & Power (with Alice E. Marwick)
    In this two-part inquiry into what the internet is doing to societies, two leading scholars who study online media take a critical look at both the affordances and dangers of large platforms like Facebook, Google, and Reddit. In this episode, Alice Marwick breaks down what actually happens when companies collect and sell the data that [...]

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    47 min
  • Societies Online: Facebook & Democracy (with Siva Vaidhyanathan)
    In this two-part inquiry into what the internet is doing to societies, two leading scholars who study online media take a critical look at both the affordances and dangers of large platforms like Facebook, Google, and Reddit. In this episode, Siva Vaidhyanathan breaks down the global power of Facebook: what it provides in a positive [...]

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    40 min
  • Individuals Online (with Amanda Hess & Jenny Odell)
    What exactly are we doing when we’re spending time online? Who profits from our presence there? And how has being on the internet changed the experience of being human?   Two high-profile writers who cover internet culture meditate on the experience of being human in the internet age. Social media has presented new phenomena—such as [...]

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    1 hr 5 min
  • Origins of the Internet (with Charlton McIlwain and Fred Turner)
    Where did the internet come from? Who gets left out of dominant stories about its origins? And what can history teach us about how to make the internet better?   In our first episode, two leading scholars of internet history—Charlton McIlwain of NYU and Fred Turner of Stanford—delve into the stories you might not have [...]

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    1 hr 1 min

About Public Books 101

From the publisher's feed

Public Books 101 takes a scholarly look at a world worth studying. In each mini-series, world-class scholars and writers join our host to examine a single topic from many angles, opening a window into the conversations that experts are having with one another about the urgent issues and problems facing us today.

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