Weekly Rundown: On “Publics”

Deep in the trenches of fairly private (soon-to-be-public) writing this week, I’ve focused my outward attention on pieces of the “news”—or, information of a wider circulation—that consider the bounds of the “public” and make interventions in those bounds in turn.

• Yesterday a friend posted this Awl article, “Podcasting and the Selling of Public Radio,” which considers a recent NPR-helmed event that served to pump up media and marketing folks with the idea of using public media as a branding service. Ira Glass, most famous for pioneering the This American Life juggernaut, provided a choice quote, dripping in sarcasm that seems to betray its actual honesty: “My hope is that we can move away from a model of asking listeners for money and join the free market. Public radio is ready for capitalism.” The article arrives at a fortuitous time, when podcasts, despite being produced in similar ways for years, have assumed a new, more urgent popularity through shows like Serial (disclaimer: I’ve never listened; I’m wary of any documentary project around which listeners rally by treating and talking about real people as fictional characters)—and some of these shows now happen to utilize advertisements that sound like the podcast itself. As Gillies writes,

“Advertising on public radio doesn’t totally undermine the virtues that make public radio public or worth supporting; we accept ads on city subway platforms and in non-profit magazines.3 However, what makes these ads troubling is that they don’t sound like ads: They sound like public radio. They exploit a special kind of trust listeners reserve for noncommercial educational media.”

• I am in awe of the work of Duke-based Project Vox, as much as I am at what I perceive to be the widespread dearth of women philosophers studied—even represented—in philosophy’s academic life. Vox, a collaborative project begun by Duke philosophy professor Andrew Janiak and students and researchers at Duke, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, aims to make accessible and advocate for the inclusion of the work of women philosophers in the academic canon (the title of this Atlantic article, which profiles the project, might better be “Creating the Female Canon”). Vox’s digital site, which is—speaking of publics—open-source, includes texts by 17^th-century women philosophers as well as sample syllabi that incorporate said work. The emphasis of the project is as much on presenting this work as it is on ensuring it’s presented—and made visible—in the best possible ways. This reinforces Vox’s belief in the high stakes of this material; as Duke Ph.D. candidate Adela Deanova said, “We don’t want people to add women to a course for politically correct reasons. We want them to teach these works because they are important part of this time period, and if you are not teaching them, you are not giving students an accurate picture of what went on.”

• Recently Durham invited residents to tour an auspicious location: Durham’s Central Park, which has recently provided room for a new occupant—a giant red construction crane—ahead of its forthcoming occupants: the many who will supposedly fill the 100-unit condo complex scheduled to be built in the next year or so. For Indy Week, my friend and Duke Magazine staff writer Elizabeth Van Brocklin jumped into the community-centered walking tour, which was also Durham’s first Jane’s Walk, a nationally organized activity meant to honor the legacy of urban anthropologist Jane Jacobs. Those on the tour learned about the buildings and businesses—past, present, and future—in the Central Park area. A walker with a two-year-old son, who moved from Los Angeles eight years ago, wonders what a Durham Jane’s Walk will look and feel like when is son is five—and when his son is twenty-five. The walk’s leaders, two founders of the Central Park (from which the neighborhood gets its name), intended the trip to be an invitation to the public: to Durham’s public, to anyone who cares about the future of the city, about how, as Van Brocklin writes, the city “can grow gracefully,” even, in Durham’s case, when new construction seems to demand the opposite.

—MD