“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam         or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...
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“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two  -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...
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“who is this woman?”

A poem by Solange Claws

We are proud to introduce Huddled Masses, a journal of writing and arts on the themes of Migration and Mobility sponsored by the Zolberg Institute and published in partnership with Public Seminar. Our goal is to provide the middle ground, to bridge the gap between the academic journal and the news, to raise ...
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“who is this woman?”

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

The New School creative writing professor talks about her latest novel, Come with Me

At the center of the story is Amy -- partner of Dan, parent of the teenage Jack and twins Miles and Theo, and, most recently, employee of Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old geek-savant son. Donny has hired Amy as PR rep and guinea pig for his new project, Furrier.com, a ...
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Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

What’s the Point of a Creative Writing Workshop?

Writing and resistance in the Age of Trump

Two days after the 2016 election, people arrived in my writing workshop talking non-stop. Their disbelief, grief, anger, and guilt at not ‘having done enough,’ ricocheted around the room. It was a challenge for them to focus on the page. In the weeks that followed, this scene repeated itself over ...
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Will Trump Defund Culture?

History Says No

It doesn't surprise me that the first Trump budget proposes to eliminate all federal cultural and public broadcast funding. It's the same script we have been seeing for almost forty years. First, the amounts of federal money devoted to arts and culture are infinitesimal, particularly when you compare them to ...
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A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...
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A Pure Solar World

Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

The Left is very good at both recrimination and self-recrimination.  While salutary, both can be carried to extremes, and thus become self-defeating. Public protest about the election of Trump is both understandable and righteous – after all, he has publically and I assume sincerely expressed contempt for the norms and ...
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Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

It’s been a weird year (the weirdest I can remember at least), and Thursday morning’s announcement that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature made it weirder still. But, overall, it is weird in a welcome way.

Pre-announcement speculation centered on the possibility that the prize might be awarded to an ...

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Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

At The Beginning Was The Imagination

At the beginning was the imagination, with its capricious subversive nature. But then a charming guy called "capitalism" arrived on the scene and promised to bring bread to everybody. People believed him, although it was soon evident that he was more interested in actually enriching somebody. But, most of all, ...
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At The Beginning Was The Imagination

RetroDada Manifesto

The RetroDada Manifesto was written at the invitation of Anita Hugi and David Dufresne for an event at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, 4 & 5 March 2016, to celebrate the Dada centenary, in there place where it all began. For more information on that event, and related projects see http://dada-data.net/en/  Below ...
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RetroDada Manifesto