Public Housing and Asthma

Another winter of discontent, or relief at last?

For the many thousands of New Yorkers who live with asthma -- including an estimated 174,000 children under the age of 12 -- the winter months can often be particularly painful and debilitating. Cold, dry air outdoors, and in poorly heated spaces indoors, constricts nasal passages and the body’s other ...
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Public Housing and Asthma

Can Gillette’s New Ad Turn Minds as Well as Heads?

Even as ‘virtue schooling’ widens the political divide, a new discussion space is up for grabs

When I started seeing headlines about the Gillette ad backlash, I assumed that the online reverberations came from feminists frustrated that the new advertisement was not “new” enough: too generic, too vague, too still-just-selling-razors. As it turned out, most of the online anger came from men who felt that the advertisement’s call ...
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Can Gillette’s New Ad Turn Minds as Well as Heads?

New York is the Place

How the city has defined The New School

The 1918 proposal to create a “new school” ended with a rousing declaration of the innovation of the idea, the significance of the moment, and, most of all, the importance of New York. The proposers believed that this city -- “the greatest social science laboratory in the world” -- would attract scholars ...
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New York is the Place

Reconsidering the History of Race through Peyote

How categories of belonging are made in Mexico

Loyalties begin with a sense of belonging, a sense of who is on the inside and who is on the outside. I suppose that historians almost invariably interrogate notions of loyalty as we imagine our historical subjects; how they experienced their connections and obligations, and how this in turned shaped ...
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Reconsidering the History of Race through Peyote

How Socrates Can Help Psychotherapists

When two minds meet like steel striking flint

As the field of psychotherapy focuses more on treatment manuals and the regimented nature of clinical research, the practice risks losing the subtle nuances that guide the interactive fluidity of therapy sessions. Can clinicians combat this loss by incorporating ideals from ancient philosophy into contemporary psychotherapy? In The Socratic Method of ...
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How Socrates Can Help Psychotherapists

Learning to See SPURA

Reflections on urban displacement, art, and community praxis

For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in ...
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Learning to See SPURA

Marching on Washington, the LA Teachers’ Strike, and Cities and Economic Inequality

Past Present Episode 164

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss marching on Washington as a form of political protest, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike, and how American cities reflect economic inequality. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Native American and pro-life activists both marched in Washington, D.C., last ...
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Marching on Washington, the LA Teachers’ Strike, and Cities and Economic Inequality

When SPURA and Visual Urbanism Meet

An interview with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a new book by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, charts the long, dispiriting, and complicated history of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) on the Lower East Side of New York. Over five years, Bendiner-Viani walked ...
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When SPURA and Visual Urbanism Meet

To Hell With Maduro and With Trump

Thoughts on Socialism, Venezuela, and Freedom

The Venezuelan system has been in crisis for some time. This crisis, like all crises, is no doubt overdetermined. It has global, regional, and domestic dimensions. And its primary victims are the ordinary people of Venezuela. If you have any doubts, I recommend a look at Amnesty International’s 2018 report, ...
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To Hell With Maduro and With Trump

How to Mark a Centennial

Telling the Story of the New School at 100

“In 1896, a minor event occurred in New York’s art world that would, in time, transform American art education.” So began the sample script sent to 60 Minutes by the consultant hired to help make the upcoming centennial an event of national significance. CBS didn’t bite, and the proposed segment never ...
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How to Mark a Centennial

How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

An interview with Kim Lane Scheppele and Daniel Hegedűs

The Hungarian regime has a wide range of tools to repress its people and it deploys them cleverly to avoid drawing too much criticism at home and abroad. The Green European Journal spoke with Professor Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University and political scientist Daniel Hegedűs about Hungary’s autocratic turn ...
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How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

My So-Called Life

Angela Chase, Body Image, and Teen Angst

In August 1994, ABC aired the pilot episode of My So-Called Life, and for the first time I felt that a television show spoke directly to me. I was fifteen, self-conscious, and searching for identity in a rural suburb of Lansing, Michigan. Shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place obsessed over affluence, sexuality, ...
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My So-Called Life