Madeleine Schwartz — How We See It
Journalist Madeleine Schwartz assembles twelve global perspectives on a changing America — a collection of essays that reads US politics and culture from outside the American media bubble.
Why we picked this
Schwartz edits the New York Review of Books and has assembled writers whose relationship to America is observational rather than participatory — the resulting view is clarifying in ways that insider commentary rarely is.
How We See It is a collection of twelve essays by international writers — journalists, intellectuals, and cultural critics from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America — examining the United States at a moment of acute instability. Editor Madeleine Schwartz, an editor at the New York Review of Books and a contributor to major American and European publications, has assembled a set of perspectives shaped by distance: writers who know American culture well enough to take it seriously but are not embedded in its political anxieties.
The result, as the event description suggests, is a genuinely external view — the kind of analytical clarity that is difficult to achieve from inside a system you are also living through. The essays cover American politics, media, culture, and foreign policy, and the collection is organized around the question of what the United States looks like to people who have to understand it without being consumed by it.
This is a shorter-format afternoon event that offers something relatively rare at political bookstores: a conversation about America that begins from outside it. For readers saturated by American political commentary, the vantage point alone is worth the evening.