Bear Fight in Chicago

We all need to remember that we may love our sports teams but they don’t love us back

Football season is well and truly underway, and so, apparently, is football stadium subsidy season. First it was the Buffalo Bills, and now it’s the Chicago Bears, whose owners started the process of purchasing land that would allow the team to move from its current home at Soldier Field in ...
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Bear Fight in Chicago

Don’t Feel Guilty for Loving Football

Just be honest about it

It was a punishing number of hits every game, but the guy was tough. As author Louie Robinson described him in a December 1968 Ebony Magazine profile, O.J. Simpson was six feet, two inches tall, weighed 207 pounds and could run 100 yards in 9.4 seconds. A transfer to the University of ...
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Don’t Feel Guilty for Loving Football

Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

Jeff Goldfarb navigated–and worked through–the polar opposites that can define academic and political life

_____ Jeff Goldfarb has been my teacher, colleague, and friend: our conversations about culture, politics, democracy, and activism—through reading and writing, in public and private forums—have continued since I began as a student in the Department of Sociology at the NSSR. From and with Jeff, and by studying sites within which democracy ...
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Learning to Think About Memory and Politics

What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

_____ In March of 2020, with the pandemic devastating New York and Queens being declared the “epicenter of the epicenter” it felt impossible to find words to describe the uncertainty, the losses, the distance. Over the coming months, Alexandra Délano Alonso gathered images and fragmentary language to hold what was (and still ...
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What Can’t be Contained

Inheritance

Pregnant Girl: A story of teen motherhood, college, and creating a better future for young families

_____ Honey. For a long time, that’s the only name I had for her, and it fit. Her voice, soothing like honey drizzling over a piece of warm buttered toast, came through the phone every few months. as if she was reading a book or singing a hymn, she chose each word carefully ...
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Inheritance

The PMC Has Children

Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

_____ From the very moment of conception, which for professional managerial class (PMC) parents is always a “choice,” the future child and infant possesses “potential” that has to be both optimized and maximized. PMC mothers have to do prenatal yoga while setting up intrauterine Mozart streams on pregnant bellies. Preparing for ...
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The PMC Has Children

Hilaria Baldwin’s Newest Baby Should Make Us All Happy

A fresh baby makes us understand how little we understand of other families

_____ In its infinite generative power, Twitter recently churned up an oddly enchanting term: the fresh baby. What is a fresh baby, you may ask? Well, a fresh baby is the baby you get when you already have a newish baby, say less than six months old, and then all of ...
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Hilaria Baldwin’s Newest Baby Should Make Us All Happy

The AIDS Capital of the World

As a pandemic escalated in 1984, one South Florida town predicted the calamity AIDS would become

In 1985 researchers and reporters alike focused their attention on the city with the highest rate of AIDS diagnoses anywhere, a city that had become colloquially known as the “AIDS Capital of the World.” This city was neither New York City nor San Francisco, nor was it to be found ...
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The AIDS Capital of the World

How to be Thankful in 2020

Making the best of video conferencing, social distancing, and Star Trek

Ten years ago, I remember trying to coordinate watching a TV show with a friend who was across the country from me. He was in San Diego at the time while I was in Boston; while social distancing would not be a phrase for a decade, we were certainly physical ...
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How to be Thankful in 2020

Who Is Disfigured by a Cleft Lip?

When happiness hinges on having a “normal” face, the many possibilities for human life are narrowed

When my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister, she went to consult a cleft jaw and lip expert in London. She lay down on the examining table, lifted her legs up and peered at the doctor as he glared at the black and white image. She had done these ...
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Who Is Disfigured by a Cleft Lip?

Psychoanalysis and Post-Truth

A discussion of the evolution of politics and truth in our contemporary world

On November 1st and 8th, the Freud Museum, London will be hosting a digital conference on “Psychoanalysis and ‘Post-Truth’,” organized with Jordan Osserman and Foivos Dousos in partnership with the Ministry of Post-Truth and Waiting Times. The event takes place during the weekends before and after the US election, offering critical ...
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Psychoanalysis and Post-Truth

Trump, Coronavirus, and Presidential Health

Past Present Podcast, Episode 250

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: President Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, and much of his inner circle quickly reported positive diagnoses as well. Natalia referred to this Vanity Fair article linking the slow response to the pandemic to its early prevalence in blue ...
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