It’s been a terrific year at Public Seminar — one that causes us to reflect on the satisfactions of human community, and the social bonds that can form around a common project.
In past years we have had some great Thanksgiving posts from Mackenzie Wark, Jeremy Varon and Jeff Goldfarb. Claire Potter, at her old Tenured Radical perch, used to occasionally give out awards to the top ten “turkeys” of the year: for a blast from the blogging past, you can see them here and here.
We have much to look forward to in 2018, but wanted to pause on this day of gratitute to thank a few people for the leaps and bounds we have made this year.
- To Dara Levendosky, our managing editor.
- To all of our editors, and our managers: they are the lifeblood of our operation, and we could not function without them.
- To our senior editors, both on The New School faculty and on other faculties, who bring us great stories and a vision for how to present them.
- To our writers.
- To the Dean of the New School for Social Research, who has believed in this project from the beginning.
- To Provost Tim Marshall, who saw in Public Seminar a new window into The New School’s creativity and took us to the next level.
- To Michael Gellert, whose generosity supports our graduate students in their editorial work.
- To Seth Cohen, who manages our budget.
- To A-J Aronstein, who gives us the best advice on how to get the word out about Public Seminar and promotes the heck out of us every week.
- To our New School colleagues, who put up with our boundless enthusiasm for this project, and our constant inquiries about whether that talk they just gave “would be good for Public Seminar.”
We are unveiling some new initiatives in the next few months that we think our readers will be excited about (hint: some of them are for our listeners!), and are planning spring events. Public Seminar is an open platform; it, as well as our events, will always be free. But if you want to show your support for our work, please go here to make a year end, tax-deductible donation.
Finally, we want to thank you — as Jay Rosen once called you “the people formerly known as the audience” — who read, who comment, who pass us on to your friends, who like us on Facebook and retweet our tweets. Its the thousands of hits we get from you that lets us know that you get us, and that we are well embarked on a beautiful friendship.
