Blood for the Future

The Northern Ireland “Troubles” in Les Levine’s Resurrection

These events form part of the Holy Cross Dispute, a period of eight months of acute sectarian tension in Northern Ireland. During this time, Holy Cross Girls Primary School, a Catholic elementary school in a Protestant enclave of Ardoyne, north Belfast, was picketed by hundreds of loyalist Protestant protestors trying to stop ...
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Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...
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True to the Paradox

An exhibition for the centennial of a contradiction

This essay was originally published on August 21 2019. To mark the centennial, The New School approached Anna Harsanyi and myself (we are both alumni of The New School) to curate an exhibition in the Sheila Johnson Design Center. For me, the task raised many questions, bringing me back to the ...
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The Reviews Are In

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece

Will Durant’s The Life of Greece, the second volume in the “Story of Civilization” series, was published in 1939, a grim year for “Western Civilization.” Despite -- or perhaps because -- the book was such a popular success, it was reviewed in a handful of academic journals. Two reviews of this volume ...
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Why Intellectual Property Rights Matter

A review of Roberto Unger’s ‘The Knowledge Economy’

The structure of The Knowledge Economy roughly mirrors this dual ambition. The 287-page work of pure theory is organized into digestible, cumulative micro-chapters. The first seven theorize the structure of the knowledge economy. Chapters eight and nine turn to the issues of inequality and precarity. The following eight chapters look at ...
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Did Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages’ Really Deserve to Be Met With Such… Outrage?

Despite the backlash, Wolf’s story of how love and words are silenced is an important account of the misery institutionalized homophobia causes.

When the BBC’s Matthew Sweet called out Naomi Wolf mid-interview, some listeners would not have been hugely surprised. It appeared to be just another manifestation of what Casper Schoemaker, writing on the bestselling Beauty Myth in 2004, called “Wolf’s Overdo and Lie Factor (WOLF),” this time surfacing in Wolf’s new book,Outrages: Sex, Censorship, ...
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Wounds Yet to Scar: Collective Memory in Contemporary Chilean Video Art

Memory and trauma in Remembering What Is at Lunds Konsthall

In the film, Guzmán and his crew interview members of the increasingly split electorate. They attend rallies, ride buses, and show up in modern high-rise apartments, asking the people they meet the same two questions: “Who will win the election?” and “How do you see the future?” This film plays a ...
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What’s Missing In Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love’

The moment at which I genuinely threw the book across the room was thirty pages from the end.

In 2013, when I heard Naomi Wolf give a talk about the Ph.D. research she was then pursuing at Oxford, my first reaction was panic. Twenty-three years old, I had recently completed what is still the most intense, all-consuming experience of my life: researching and writing a 75,000-word undergraduate ...
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How the North American Free Trade Agreement ruined Nourishment

A Review of “Eating NAFTA”

Eating NAFTA demonstrates the urgency of responding to a clear and yet mostly invisible health crisis that manifests across borders. It offers tools for rethinking existing approaches to trade and food systems from a transnational, intersectional and structural perspective that shifts the blame that public institutions have placed on individuals (particularly ...
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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?”

Permanent Mystifications

The Story of Post-Conceptual Art in Slovakia

Prague City Gallery’s “Probe 1: The Story of Slovak (Post)Conceptual Art” (12th December 2018 - 24th March 2019) came and went unnoticed. This is hardly surprising, despite the prime location of the museum’s 13th-century Stone Bell House site: a corner of the Old Town Square beneath the piercing spires of the Church ...
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Permanent Mystifications

Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Imani Perry’s ‘Looking for Lorraine’ Review

The play A Raisin in the Sun is one of the most recognizable stage productions in the last 60 years of American history. Many Americans have encountered it -- whether on Broadway, at a local production, in film, or in a high school or college classroom. Yet, the person who wrote it, ...
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Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle