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, ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

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 ...
Read More

“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 ...
Read More
“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 ...
Read More
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, ...
Read More
Lorraine Hansberry and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

How to Do It

Sex Education and the “Sex Life”

In 1696, in Somerset county in southwest England, a schoolboy named John Cannon and his friends took their lunchtime break on the banks of a river near their schoolhouse. Unlike other uneventful riverside lunches, though, this day was memorable enough for Cannon to record in his memoirs. An older boy ...
Read More
How to Do It

Warhol: The Revolution that Failed

A review of the Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again exhibition at The Whitney Museum.

The recent reappearance of Andy Warhol’s paintings, films, sculptures, and silkscreens at The Whitney in New York City reminded me of the writings of Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013), a professor of philosophy at Columbia University as well as art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009. Like many philosophers of his ...
Read More
Warhol: The Revolution that Failed

Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi

A Jo Freeman Review of ‘Won Over’

When I was working in Mississippi for SCLC in 1966, I would not have believed that any of the young white men I saw on the streets (mostly harassing us) would ever reject white supremacy. They appeared as dedicated to its domination as sports fans are to their clubs. William Alsup writes that ...
Read More
Reflections of a Federal Judge from Jim Crow Mississippi

The All Too Human Behavioral Geneticists

A review of Aaron Panofsky’s Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a social theorist of our generation, possessed of rich data and much sociological insight, must be in want of Bourdieu. In what follows, I will try to explicate why I think the ironic meaning of this statement is as true as its literal ...
Read More
The All Too Human Behavioral Geneticists

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