Public Culture Project

As we mark the first quarter-millenium anniversary of our perennially young country, Americans are once again asking, with particular urgency: who are we? This is far from the first time that we have faced a moment of disunity, alienation or definitional...

Even as academic enrollments in the arts and humanities falter, there is a persistent, and even growing interest in the kinds of texts, artifacts and experiences that the arts and humanities offer. To meet this hunger, new educational initiatives are...

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, October 14 (5:30–7:00 PM) for a panel with Lisa Ruddick , Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor , and George Scialabba , moderated by Nikhil Goyal . Introduced by Daniel Wortel-London . Cosponsored by the Harvard...

The recent explosion of AI capacity, along with booming prophecies about its limitless potential, arrive at a moment of unease. Across the developed world, trust in human beings, their institutions and the future they might build is at a nadir. There is a...

America, we are reliably told, is coming apart. Individuals are drifting off into isolation, or, just as bad, clinging to toxic forms of tribalism that rely on exclusion and enmity towards the other. Why is this happening? What are the deep cultural...

Higher education has been “in crisis” for decades. Some observers have sounded the alarm about skyrocketing tuition, decreasing economic return on investment, a loss of open-ended inquiry to ideological rigidity, widening socioeconomic gaps between those...

It is no secret that enrollment in arts and humanities courses is down, all across academia. Professors have been laid off, and whole departments have been eliminated in the past several years, as universities market their education as explicit career...

Salad chains, consultant-speak, Parks & Rec. Is this really the world that liberals want? Or, is there a more beautiful vision of what kind of world we could build together, what all of this liberty is for? This question is increasingly urgent, as self...

America has sometimes been described as a pragmatic, anti-intellectual society. But in fact, from the Puritans to the Founders to the New York intellectuals and the Civil Rights movement, many major movements in American life have drawn language and...