Body & Mind Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

To have family is to own something

March 30, 2026 • by Sophie Lewis

“The Left has largely abandoned questions of the family,” charged the queer and trans Marxists K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson in 2015. “Tacitly, at least, leftist organizations today have accepted families as a feature of contemporary capitalist society, which they will do nothing to end.” The authors’ timely ...

Resurgent Dreams of the Capitalist Family’s Positive Supersession

Interviews

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

A conversation with author Dominic Pettman on how the phenomenon of ghosting is experienced in the modern age

March 26, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Dominic Pettman

Ghosting: when someone just stops replying to messages, stops returning calls, and for all intents and purposes vanishes without warning from your life. The term names the sudden ending of a relationship, through disappearance rather than a clear confrontation or closing act: It describes a mode of withdrawal by absence ...

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...

Public Health

Death Rights

The risks of New York State’s new Medical Aid in Dying law

February 19, 2026 • by Megan Robinson

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Medical Aid in Dying Act (MAiD) into state law in early February, months after the legislation passed the state Senate in June 2025. The bill’s passing prompted an extended period of debate, advocacy, and amending, centered on whether mentally competent, terminally ill New ...

Sex & Gender

A League of Their Own

From Rio’s local pitches to the Gay Games, queer athletes challenge the presumed heterosexuality of Brazil’s national sport

February 18, 2026 • by C. K. Snyder

One of the teams that created the LiGay [the amateur Brazilian “Gay League”] was the BeesCats Soccer Boys from Rio de Janeiro. Organizers formed the team in 2017 with a triple aim: to demonstrate that gay men are indeed futebolistas, to help players overcome personal trauma, and to assert their ...

Psyche

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

On self-identity and the philosophy of addiction

February 10, 2026 • by Hanna Pickard

Reader, I do not know who you are. In particular, I do not know whether you use drugs, whether you are addicted to drugs, or whether, in addition to being addicted to drugs, you identify as an addict. If you do identify as an addict, I hope to speak to ...

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

Sports

Feminism, Sports, and Football in North Korea

Women’s football is one of the very few areas in which North Korea can display excellence to international audiences

February 3, 2026 • by Jung Woo Lee

While North Korea's political doctrine displays a revisionist character that combines nationalism with communism, traditional socialist feminism still influences its gender policy. The key tenet of socialist feminism includes the emancipation of women from economic dependency on their male counterparts and their liberation from confinement to household duties (Mojab 2015). ...

Feminism, Sports, and Football in North Korea

Genocide

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

December 2, 2025 • by Ayotunde Giwa

On October 28, 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher. Satellite images show what Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified as bodies scattered across the hospital grounds. Videos filmed by RSF fighters themselves show militia walking through ransacked wards, stepping over piles of dead ...

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Media

Eight Months to Learn Spanish

The 2026 World Cup will be a revelation, proving soccer’s arrival in the United States and inviting more Americans to see themselves as part of a Spanish-speaking Americas

November 25, 2025 • by Sean Jacobs and Ivan Pech Luna

On Sunday, October 26, Spain’s two powerhouse clubs, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, met once again in El Clásico, the name given to any clash between the two. Both teams command massive global followings, including in the United States, and this weekend was no exception. The match, held at the ...

Climate & Ecology

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

A city holding its breath

October 14, 2025 • by Uswa Shamail

Environmental crises are often narrated in statistics, satellite images, and policy briefings, but what they obscure are the intimate ways in which ecological collapse infiltrates daily life. In South Asia, climate change is not an abstract future—it is a suffocating present that shapes how parents care for their children, how ...

Ecological Nightmare in Lahore, Pakistan

Psyche

“Masc Only”

When gender conformity is enforced everywhere from laws to dating apps, opacity becomes a site of resistance

September 30, 2025 • by Yann Phesans

A gay man lowers his voice in the boardroom. A trans woman is detained at border control when her appearance does not match her passport photo. A nonbinary teenager avoids mirrors. A butch lesbian is asked to leave the women’s changing room for “making others uncomfortable.” These are not moments of ...