Since 2012, Public Books has championed a new kind of community for intellectual engagement, discussion, and action. An online magazine that unites the best of the university with the openness of the internet, Public Books is where new ideas are debuted, old facts revived, and dangerous illusions dismantled. Here, young scholars present fresh thinking to audiences outside the academy, accomplished authors weigh in on timely issues, and a wide range of readers encounter the most vital academic insights and explore what they mean for the world at large.

Think in Public: A Public Books Reader presents a selection of inspiring essays that exemplify the magazine’s distinctive approach to public scholarship. Gathered here are Public Books contributions from today’s leading thinkers, including Jill Lepore, Imani Perry, Kim Phillips-Fein, Salamishah Tillet, Jeremy Adelman, N. D. B. Connolly, Namwali Serpell, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The result is a guide to the most exciting contemporary ideas about literature, politics, economics, history, race, capitalism, gender, technology, and climate change by writers and researchers pushing public debate about these topics in new directions. Think in Public is a lodestone for a rising generation of public scholars and a testament to the power of knowledge.

Introduction, by Sharon Marcus and Caitlin Zaloom
Part I. Ask in Public
On Accelerationism, by Fred Turner
Justice for Data Janitors, by Lilly Irani
Anthropocene and Empire, by Stacey Balkan
Changing Climates of History, by J. R. McNeill
The Year of Black Memoir, by Imani Perry
Pop Justice, by Frances Negrón-Muntaner
A Black Power Method, by N. D. B. Connolly
Soft Atheism, by Matthew Engelke
Where Do Morals Come From?, by Philip Gorski
The Alchemy of Finance, by Kim Phillips-Fein
How Gentrifiers Gentrify, by Max Holleran
Syria’s Wartime Famine at 100: “Martyrs of the Grass”, by Najwa al-Qattan
The Mortal Marx, by Jeremy Adelman
Who Segregated America?, by Destin Jenkins
The Invention of the “White Working Class”, by Andrew J. Perrin
Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy, by Kieran Setiya
The World Silicon Valley Made, by Shannon Mattern
Part II. Think in Public
Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things: An Interview, by B. R. Cohen
James Baldwin’s Istanbul, by Suzy Hansen
When Stuart Hall Was White, by James Vernon
An Interview with Former Black Panther Lynn French , by Salamishah Tillet
Black Intellectuals and White Audiences, by Matthew Clair
Can There Be a Feminist World?, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, by John Plotz
Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking, by Christopher Schaberg
If You’re Woke You Dig It: William Melvin Kelley, by Eli Rosenblatt
Translating the Untranslatable: An Interview with Barbara Cassin, by Rebecca L. Walkowitz
My Neighbor Octavia, by Sheila Liming
Stop Defending the Humanities, by Simon During
Painting While Shackled to a Floor, by Nicole R. Fleetwood
Part III. Read in Public
To Translate Is to Betray: On Elena Ferrante, by Rebecca Falkoff
What Global English Means for World Literature, by Haruo Shirane
The Stranger’s Voice, by Karl Ashoka Britto
Can’t Stop Screaming, by Judith Butler
The Model-Minority Bubble, by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
Free Is and Free Ain’t, by Salamishah Tillet
The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg, by Marah Gubar
In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism, by Anne E. Fernald
Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing, by Namwali Serpell
Chick Lit Meets the Avant-Garde, by Tess McNulty
Feeling Like the Internet, by Mark McGurl
The People v. O. J. Simpson as Historical Fiction, by Nicholas Dames
Kafka: The Impossible Biography, by Jan Mieszkowski
Shirley Jackson’s Two Worlds, by Karen Dunak
Reading to Children to Save Ourselves, by Daegan Miller
List of Contributors