Co-Executive Editor, Public Seminar and Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

From the Editors

Essential Services

When people risk their lives to care for us, they deserve our care too

April 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Although I was in a stage of disbelief about the crisis to come that now seems darkly comical, and I had only come along for the ride, I understood the purpose of everything but the water. We buy water in anticipation of a significant weather event, I said: but under ...

From the Editors

Over Our Dead Bodies

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” and the lessons of contemporary history

April 8, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Perhaps it is inevitable that middlebrow culture seems particularly meaningful at moments of disarray. When Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, the hottest cultural phenomenon was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical, and each song — ostensibly about the American Revolution and its aftermath — seemed to ...

From the Editors

Ideas Are Our Weapons

As the world moves under our feet, and we self-isolate, we are still a community of thinkers

March 31, 2020 • by Claire Potter

With these words, we invite you to leave the world of illness, of darkened classrooms, empty streets and overwhelmed intensive care units. Come with us instead to visit the so-called “New York intellectuals,” a world where Howe, Mack, Richard Hofstadter, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and others wrote, edited, read and ...

From the Editors

An Antidote for a Pandemic? A Good Book

As we struggle with forces beyond our control, remembering smaller comforts and pleasures can soothe, if perhaps not cure, what ails us

March 25, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Instead, it was: I bet the book I ordered three weeks ago has arrived! And it had. It was but the work of a moment to walk down the street and knock on the closed shop door. It cracked open, and we saw our local bookseller hovering in the darkness at ...

From the Editors

Praise the Lord and Pass the Hand Sanitizer

To heck with elections: we’re all at war with a virus now

March 18, 2020 • by Claire Potter

We agree with Governor DeWine on this thing, and perhaps this thing only. While the coronavirus pandemic is endlessly political, public health is more important things than politics now. We say this even though intervening in the election in this practical way may a signal how the legitimacy of the ...

Praise the Lord and Pass the Hand Sanitizer

From the Editors

Remember, Remember, It’s All About November. And Coronavirus.

Joe Biden’s resounding victory over Bernie Sanders reflects voter fatigue and voter fear, but also confidence in the establishment

March 10, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Pryzbyla pointed out that farmers in the Upper Peninsula, many of whom voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and then for Donald Trump, are now going bankrupt because of Trump’s immigration policies. The cherries for which they are so famous rotted in the fields last summer. But Sanders’s socialism scared them ...

Remember, Remember, It’s All About November. And Coronavirus.

North America

Warren Supporters Have Vowed to Persist

But are the flaws in the Sanders campaign significant enough that backing Joe Biden’s “establishment” bid is the best political choice for them?

March 7, 2020 • by Claire Potter

David Plouffe, who was on the News Hour last week talking about his new book and a radically pruned Democratic presidential candidate field, says there isn't. I guess Plouffe (pronounced "Pluff" — I have been calling him "Ploofe" for years) should know. If there were an establishment, he would be ...

From the Editors

Joeypalooza!

The Biden campaign comes roaring back to give Bernie Sanders a cold shower on Super Tuesday

March 3, 2020 • by Claire Potter

“What he was, was tough from the neck up,” Richard Ben Cramer wrote about Biden in What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992), “but it wasn’t just fights: if you could run,” one of Biden’s friends would tell you, “Joe Biden could run faster. If you had ...

North America

Are the Primaries – or the Voters –“Just Dumb”?

As the Sanders revolution surges ahead, efforts to block his candidacy increasingly look like rigging – not reform

February 29, 2020 • by Claire Potter

When we look back on the 2020 election cycle, one clear theme will be the tension between reform and revolution that Democrats have wrestled with since the primary season began. A second may be the need to reform the rules regulating the party’s primaries and caucuses. Case in point: the lead editorial ...

Are the Primaries – or the Voters –“Just Dumb”?

Exiles on 12th Street

Ripped From the Headlines

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Seven

February 28, 2020 • by Claire Potter

What has happened to the news? As the proliferation of terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts” indicates, we can’t take everything we read at face value. So who can we trust? The seventh episode of Exiles on 12th Street investigates how news media has changed, and how the headlines ...

From the Editors

The 2,000-Year-Old Men

February 26, 2020 • by Claire Potter

We have had this guilty thought long before Mayor Pete articulated it for us in his unique tone, one in which he manages to convey optimism, despair and his own brand of aggression simultaneously. Lately, as Sanders’s actual policies seem to be impressing more and more voters, and an extraordinary ...

North America

Revisiting the Netroots, 2020 Edition

Recent reports that Russia has been interfering with the election are no surprise — but this is what to do about it

February 22, 2020 • by Claire Potter

But at Public Seminar, we have been paying attention to the corruption of what blogger Jerome Armstrong dubbed “the netroots” in 2002: grassroots political activism that occurs primarily online. In collaboration with our friends in the Eurozine network, we have a cluster of articles in this week’s issue about Disinformation. Adam Ramsay shows how disinformation, on its ...

Claire Potter

Essential Services

When people risk their lives to care for us, they deserve our care too

Over Our Dead Bodies

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” and the lessons of contemporary history

Ideas Are Our Weapons

As the world moves under our feet, and we self-isolate, we are still a community of thinkers

An Antidote for a Pandemic? A Good Book

As we struggle with forces beyond our control, remembering smaller comforts and pleasures can soothe, if perhaps not cure, what ails us

Praise the Lord and Pass the Hand Sanitizer

To heck with elections: we’re all at war with a virus now

Remember, Remember, It’s All About November. And Coronavirus.

Joe Biden’s resounding victory over Bernie Sanders reflects voter fatigue and voter fear, but also confidence in the establishment

Warren Supporters Have Vowed to Persist

But are the flaws in the Sanders campaign significant enough that backing Joe Biden’s “establishment” bid is the best political choice for them?

Joeypalooza!

The Biden campaign comes roaring back to give Bernie Sanders a cold shower on Super Tuesday

Are the Primaries – or the Voters –“Just Dumb”?

As the Sanders revolution surges ahead, efforts to block his candidacy increasingly look like rigging – not reform

Ripped From the Headlines

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Seven

The 2,000-Year-Old Men

Revisiting the Netroots, 2020 Edition

Recent reports that Russia has been interfering with the election are no surprise — but this is what to do about it

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