Public Books is an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship. www.publicbooks.orghttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.socialhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrdnads2bc25“Teruel’s long-awaited biography offers a unique lens through which to understand her life: that of José Teruel’s decades-long relationship with the author & all of her works.” A review of a biography of Carmen Martín Gaite, who passed away 26 years ago today: https://www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-next-century-of-carmen-martin-gaite/23 Jul 2026 20:07 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrdnads2bc25https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrdko45mbv2d“Once you start looking for them, supply chain stories are everything, everywhere, all at once.” New at PB: @henryivry.bsky.social reviews “Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space” by Susan Zieger (@ucpress.bsky.social). https://www.publicbooks.org/you-have-nothing-to-lose-but-your-supply-chains/23 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrdko45mbv2dhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrdahtbje72lNew at PB: Ellen Mayock reviews José Teruel’s “Carmen Martín Gaite. Una biografía” (@tusquetseditores.bsky.social), “an extraordinarily profound and textured portrait of Martín Gaite,” who passed away on this day in 2000. https://www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-next-century-of-carmen-martin-gaite/23 Jul 2026 16:18 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrdahtbje72lhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrd7rzf7dp2g“Sure, the white liberals will pass laws that end segregation, but will they bring about economic & social equality in the United States?” Kevin Schultz on the “limited possibilities and limited willingness of white liberals to truly bring about racial equality.” https://www.publicbooks.org/as-good-as-it-gets-talking-liberalism-with-kevin-schultz/23 Jul 2026 16:06 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrd7rzf7dp2ghttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrb275qumz2u“Zieger pays careful attention to galvanizing tropes and metaphors that have structured the emergence of logistics, whether merchants and enslaved people or pirates and middle managers.” https://www.publicbooks.org/you-have-nothing-to-lose-but-your-supply-chains/22 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrb275qumz2uhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrawoiywlq2n“Governing ideology is always going to be susceptible to revolution or at least some transition.” New at PB: In conversation with @jacobbruggeman.bsky.social, author and scholar Kevin Schultz discusses the history of liberalism. https://www.publicbooks.org/as-good-as-it-gets-talking-liberalism-with-kevin-schultz/22 Jul 2026 18:18 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrawoiywlq2nhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mrar23kbat24@henryivry.bsky.social reviews “Logistics & Power” by Susan Zieger (@ucpress.bsky.social) a “breathtaking history” of how the pathways that define our lives are “dictated by ’the violence normally hidden within capitalism’s banal procedures.’” https://www.publicbooks.org/you-have-nothing-to-lose-but-your-supply-chains/22 Jul 2026 16:37 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mrar23kbat24https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr6mcjcenk26“Liberals get pilloried in the 1970s and in the 1980s. What do you believe in? Where are your deep-seated foundational beliefs? And so goes the history of liberalism.” https://www.publicbooks.org/as-good-as-it-gets-talking-liberalism-with-kevin-schultz/21 Jul 2026 20:07 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr6mcjcenk26https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr6g7llxjn2lThe “success of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation [of the Odyssey]” lies in its double-vision—giving us a “window into the rage of battle” and ambiguities and ambivalences alike. “Here’s hoping Nolan’s film looks out with a similarly Janus-faced stare.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-ableism-of-kings-the-fury-of-trump/21 Jul 2026 18:18 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr6g7llxjn2lhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr6dvac2b72n@jacobbruggeman.bsky.social interviews author Kevin Schultz about his new book “Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals),” a “a sobering yet strangely hopeful history” of the label from “its Rooseveltian birth to its contemporary malaise.” https://www.publicbooks.org/as-good-as-it-gets-talking-liberalism-with-kevin-schultz/21 Jul 2026 17:36 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr6dvac2b72nhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr5wfmasvv2l“The capitalist profit imperatives underlying the NFL’s evasive concussion rhetoric are obvious: Violence sells; league-sanctioned suicide does not.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-pain-is-the-point-on-the-violent-realities-of-capitalist-sport/21 Jul 2026 13:35 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr5wfmasvv2lhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr3zbcygqo24“There’s a narrow focus on individual wrongdoing at the expense of broader institutional critiques when it comes to assault charges in professional sports.” New at PB: Michael Knapp on structural coercion in contemporary sports. https://www.publicbooks.org/the-pain-is-the-point-on-the-violent-realities-of-capitalist-sport/20 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr3zbcygqo24https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr3vqo7ven2x“Attending to the dynamics of disability in epic, too, can elucidate our most authoritative genre, bring us closer to its greatest poems—like the Odyssey—and catch out the limits of who can claim heroism even now.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-ableism-of-kings-the-fury-of-trump/20 Jul 2026 18:18 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr3vqo7ven2xhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mr3fwqhhqu26In “heated” (by 19th-century standards) letters, Herman Melville asked Nathaniel Hawthorne to “his cottage.” “Hawthorne seems to have pulled away,” writes @hesterblum.bsky.social, “in a Berkshires version of Heated Rivalry’s tuna meltdown in Boston.” https://www.publicbooks.org/heated-rivalry-is-the-moby-dick-of-canadian-gay-hockey-shows/20 Jul 2026 13:35 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mr3fwqhhqu26https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqziser5kj2cNew at PB: @hesterblum.bsky.social has been reading and teaching “Moby-Dick” for 35 years. “Heated Rivalry,” she writes, fulfills what “Moby-Dick” imagines: the “dizzying possibilities for potentially liberatory worlds.” https://www.publicbooks.org/heated-rivalry-is-the-moby-dick-of-canadian-gay-hockey-shows/19 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqziser5kj2chttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqz5u5bvgl22“Odysseus’s spirit of seduction endures not only in verse, and its reception on the big screen, but in the personae of our leaders.” New at PB: Pasquale Toscano on the alike-ness of Trump and Odysseus. https://www.publicbooks.org/the-ableism-of-kings-the-fury-of-trump/19 Jul 2026 16:05 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqz5u5bvgl22https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqyvhoxyih24“In May 2025, Daniel Sailofsky—an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Toronto—officially joined the chorus of leftist sports critiques with Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-pain-is-the-point-on-the-violent-realities-of-capitalist-sport/19 Jul 2026 13:35 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqyvhoxyih24https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqwydhrg3q2u“The Jewish left has found a new diasporic cause; the Jewish right is just basically arguing that it’s antisemitism all the way down. The middle has collapsed.” New at PB: Shaul Magid talks with Eugene R. Sheppard & John Plotz. https://www.publicbooks.org/is-kahane-becoming-normalized-shaul-magid-on-meri-kahanes-zionist-radicalism/18 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqwydhrg3q2uhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqwusstppq24“Compare the moment Ilya Rozanov’s lighter clicks in the Saskatchewan cold of the first frames of episode 1 of Heated Rivalry, awaiting the electric charge of Shane Hollander’s hand—the ‘one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal’—before it can ignite.” https://www.publicbooks.org/heated-rivalry-is-the-moby-dick-of-canadian-gay-hockey-shows/18 Jul 2026 18:18 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqwusstppq24https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqwnfpph2b2g“Insofar as disability stereotypically signifies weakness, neither Trump nor Odysseus wants anything to do with it.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-ableism-of-kings-the-fury-of-trump/18 Jul 2026 16:05 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqwnfpph2b2ghttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqwk5bwrfc25“The ghost of capitalism in sports is, finally, being named.” New at PB: Michael Knapp looks at the scholars and writers who are finally giving voice to Marxist critiques of the economic underpinnings of contemporary sports. https://www.publicbooks.org/the-pain-is-the-point-on-the-violent-realities-of-capitalist-sport/18 Jul 2026 15:07 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqwk5bwrfc25https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqweyrnscq22“Shane and Ishmael are both ‘boring’ but their rabbit holing, pedantry, info-dumping, and hyperfocus encompass oceanic depths of feeling. … Both [Ilya and Queequeg] trouble their partners by smoking in bed. I could go on.” https://www.publicbooks.org/heated-rivalry-is-the-moby-dick-of-canadian-gay-hockey-shows/18 Jul 2026 13:35 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqweyrnscq22https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqukgsrfwd24“Daniel Sailofsky argues that sports reflect capitalism’s inequalities, but they also serve as a vehicle to reproduce and legitimize them.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-pain-is-the-point-on-the-violent-realities-of-capitalist-sport/17 Jul 2026 20:07 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqukgsrfwd24https://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mquhuk7jo22g“By one metric I am late to the genre of MM romance … By another metric, I’ve been immersed in it my entire adult reading life: For 35 years, I’ve been reading and rereading, writing and rewriting about, teaching and reteaching Herman Melville’s ‘Moby-Dick.’” https://www.publicbooks.org/heated-rivalry-is-the-moby-dick-of-canadian-gay-hockey-shows/17 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mquhuk7jo22ghttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqu5vduwwd2uNew at PB: Michael Knapp reviews “Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport” by Daniel Sailofsky (@uncpress.bsky.social), a “a thrilling, comprehensive Marxist critique of the violent underpinnings of contemporary sport.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-pain-is-the-point-on-the-violent-realities-of-capitalist-sport/17 Jul 2026 16:22 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqu5vduwwd2uhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqu55zlmr42nChristopher Nolan’s adaptation of the “Odyssey” lands today. For PB, Pasquale Toscano asks: “Is it any wonder, then, that the “Odyssey” is having a moment, as humans seem barely to be surviving at all?” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-ableism-of-kings-the-fury-of-trump/17 Jul 2026 16:09 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqu55zlmr42nhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqtujy5cmi2m“This is a deeply embedded American assumption of what Hannah Arendt critically called ‘eternal antisemitism’—that gentiles are antisemitic. And that was Kahane’s basic assumption.” https://www.publicbooks.org/is-kahane-becoming-normalized-shaul-magid-on-meri-kahanes-zionist-radicalism/17 Jul 2026 13:35 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqtujy5cmi2mhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqrzxuxngx2u“With his will to the lone heroism of Odysseus—who returns sans men—Trump cannot allow these disabled folks to pull focus away; he thus can’t abide them at all.” https://www.publicbooks.org/the-ableism-of-kings-the-fury-of-trump/16 Jul 2026 20:07 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqrzxuxngx2uhttps://bsky.app/profile/publicbooks.bsky.social/post/3mqrxfoivwl22“What’s happening now in the 2020s is just outright Jewish conservatism. There’s no ‘neo’ anymore. And that’s being driven by the incredibly potent influence of orthodoxy on the American Jewish establishment.” https://www.publicbooks.org/is-kahane-becoming-normalized-shaul-magid-on-meri-kahanes-zionist-radicalism/16 Jul 2026 19:21 +0000at://did:plc:vdfpnbcdvsd5veibtdpvceiw/app.bsky.feed.post/3mqrxfoivwl22