For the Love of Money
Sovereign lending, old and new. Plus, literary life, and Putin cancels the West
March 2, 2023
This week’s issue of Public Seminar features an interview with Quentin Bruneau on his new book, States and the Masters of Capital. Palak Godara explores the feeling of being “unfinished,” and much more.
Literary Life
“Sometimes the fire behind great literary magazines is the exact thing that causes them to burn out,” wrote Nick Ripatrazone in an article that appeared on Literary Hub in November, 2018. Ripatrazone’s piece had the ominous title: “Literary Magazines Are Born To Die.” But was the decades-old, and recently suspended, Creative Nonfiction doomed? Is it even dead?" Vicky Oliver on the pioneering literary magazine Creative Nonfiction and its setbacks (March 2, 2023)
“Lifelong fretting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Zeigarnik effect, named after psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, is the psychological finding that people have better memory of unfinished tasks than completed ones. Interrupting my reading with grocery runs, for instance, may actually help me remember my book better.” "In her piece, Palak Godara explores the feeling of “unfinished” and how it might be an attractive attribute (Februray 28, 2023)
Mashnun Munir is a Bengali-American poet and artist from Orlando, Florida. His work examines different aspects of his identity: Muslimness, growing up in a low-income community, grief, and the first-generation American experience. In a recent interview by Shaiful Alam, Munir’s talks about his debut poetry collection Headspun (2021) and how it came about (Februrary 27, 2023)
New to Public Seminar? Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates on the pressing issues of our times.
Russia at War
“By imposing economic sanctions on Russia in 2022, the U.S. and Europe may have hoped to trigger civil unrest and pave the way for a regime change. Instead, the unprecedented sanctions imposed by Western allies, coupled with multibillion-dollar assistance to Ukraine, have fit perfectly into the Kremlin’s rhetoric about the West trying to destroy Russia in every possible way.” Read the full piece by Anastasia Shteinert here.
The Pursuit of Profit
Quentin Bruneau is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. He recently sat down with NSSR student and Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies Communications Assistant Zoe Cole to discuss his new book, States and the Masters of Capital: Sovereign Lending, Old and New. Read the interview here (March 1, 2023).
“The increasing use of statistics by neighboring disciplines such as history and geography demonstrates how, in some sense, statistics was becoming a technique of investigation, a method of presentation of empirical facts, rather than a science in its own right.” Read the full excerpt from States and the Masters of Capital by Quentin Bruneau, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research (March 1, 2023).