Feature Archives - Page 14 of 150

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Looking Through the Lens of Weegee: An Interview with Christopher Bonanos

The NBCC biography award winner on Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous

April 28, 2019 • by Liz Sheldon

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Liz ...

Looking Through the Lens of Weegee: An Interview with Christopher Bonanos

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Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

The President Plays with Fire, and The Rest of Us Get Burned

April 28, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

My mind was reeling. I was writing a column about Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis when I learned of yesterday’s (Saturday) synagogue shooting in California by a white supremacist. The connection between these two events was immediate and obvious to me, as I will briefly explain in ...

Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

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A Reverence for Stories: Interview with Tommy Orange

The NBCC John Leonard Prize winner on There There

April 27, 2019 • by Alex Vara

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Alex ...

A Reverence for Stories: Interview with Tommy Orange

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Richard Rorty: The Dark Years

The philosopher’s vision of what is dangerous and yet possible

April 26, 2019 • by Richard J. Bernstein

The passages below are selections from “Richard Rorty: The Dark Years.” Introduction No one was more acute than American philosopher Richard Rorty in echoing and epitomizing the accusations and taunts of his critics. In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” he tells us that conservative culture warriors characterize him “one of the relativistic, ...

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Braids: a Memoir

The lessons I missed out on as a mixed kid living in a mostly white town in Central Florida

April 25, 2019 • by Jasmine Respess

I never really learned to braid. I can do a simple three strand braid, but nothing more. This is one of the lessons I missed out on as a mixed kid living in a predominantly white town. Growing up, I spent most of my time outside. By the swamp, in the ...

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Further Thoughts on Impeachment as Political Strategy

Do it to expose and weaken Trump and the Republicans for 2020

April 25, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The argument about impeachment continues, as it should. Yesterday I laid out the general case for impeachment. My argument was not ethical or legal, it was political: impeachment is a legitimate constitutional process that ought to be pursued not because it will remove Trump from office -- Senate Republicans will surely ...

Further Thoughts on Impeachment as Political Strategy

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Why Leonardo Da Vinci Matters Beyond a $450 Million Painting

500 years after his death he can still teach us to create what doesn’t exist yet

April 25, 2019 • by Francesca Fiorani

This celebrity treatment of Leonardo da Vinci misses why his work really matters. Whether or not the most recent discoveries survive the test of time (some attributions have been short-lived, as scholars’ opinions about authorship evolved), they are scheduled to be included in several major exhibitions in museums around the ...

Why Leonardo Da Vinci Matters Beyond a $450 Million Painting

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How Game of Thrones Will End

Spoilers from the fifteenth century

April 24, 2019 • by Jeffrey R. Wilson

I’m not a particularly vigorous fan of Game of Thrones, the kind who dissects all things Westeros on Internet forums. I haven’t seen any secret scripts or decoded some hidden message from the books. But I’m a scholar of Renaissance literature who’s taught a class on how the series takes its storyline ...

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For the Green New Deal / Against Ideology

Ideology looms as a threat to human decency, justice and survival

April 24, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Ideology doesn’t only undermine democracy, as I tried to demonstrate in my last post. It looms as a threat to human decency, justice and survival. I thought about this reading Jake Davis’s “Why I Want Nothing to do with the Green New Deal. Davis’s essay attracted a great deal of attention, with ...

For the Green New Deal / Against Ideology

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How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

Part Two: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

April 24, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

Editor’s note: in the first part of her essay on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Wagner discussed origins of – and the rise of resistance to – the New Polish School of the History of Shoah. In this ...

How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

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Notre Dame Cathedral, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the Center for American Progress

Past Present Episode 176

April 23, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss the fire at Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral, President Trump’s attacks against Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the history of liberal think tanks. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The world watched as Paris’ iconic Notre Dame Cathedral was engulfed ...

Notre Dame Cathedral, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the Center for American Progress

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Mass Psychology of Crisis

For a structural analysis of financialization and against the use of “fascism” as a scare tactic

April 23, 2019 • by Nancy Fraser

Mass psychology, new fascism, financialization. The conjunction of these three terms is startling. Its meaning is not immediately transparent. To grasp it requires an imaginative leap. What connects them, for me, is a fourth term, crisis. Not just financial crisis, nor indeed any crisis that is merely sectoral -- whether ecological, economic, social or ...