What Does It Mean to Educate Adults?

The Case of the New School

There is much in question about the future of higher education, but one trend is clear: the average age of undergraduates is rising. As a college degree replaces a high school degree as the basis for more jobs and the possibility of economic stability, more people are starting or returning ...
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What Does It Mean to Educate Adults?

Still Fighting Jim Crow in Georgia

Stacey Abrams is not just battling Brian Kemp, she is battling history

In 1964, Clara Curtis worked as a poll watcher at her local Cobb County, Georgia precinct. She had been working to establish a Republican Party in a state where the Democratic party had a stranglehold on local and state politics. Curtis watched each voter drop a ballot into the wooden ...
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Still Fighting Jim Crow in Georgia

Why Nationalists Insist on the Gender Binary

The attack on transgender people is part of a bigger plan to reverse gender justice

Since 2012 religious groups of many stripes have started to use the term “gender ideology” as a means to polarize the conversation about gender justice, especially in relation to non-binary individuals. What Catholics like the German sociologist Gabriele Kuby want to see is a return to what is “normal” and ...
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Why Nationalists Insist on the Gender Binary

Orban’s Government vs. The Social Sciences

Censoring scientific lectures in Hungary

A public talk that a PhD student, Orsolya Vasarhelyi, and I were scheduled to give on November 8, 2018 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ (HAS) “Hungarian Day of Science” was censored by the Academy’s deputy secretary-general Beáta Mária Barnabás. In English, our talk’s title could be translated as “The ...
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Orban’s Government vs. The Social Sciences

I Was Primed for Sex & Secularism

Reflections on Joan Wallach Scott

When I was young, I wanted to understand how one became secular. At first, I had no word for the change I sought. What I wanted– not so much to know as to do – was leave religion behind. I had been religious. I now was not. Getting there was ...
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I Was Primed for Sex & Secularism

In a Tragedy Always Look for the Helpers

A rabbi rushes to Pittsburgh looking for ways to help and finds that he is one of many 

On Saturday night, my family danced the end of Shabbat away with song. It had been a full Shabbat: celebrating an upcoming marriage, a baby just birthed, welcoming guests, Jews and non-Jews who have never experienced the Jewish day of rest, around our table. Isolated from the outside world, our ...
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In a Tragedy Always Look for the Helpers

Upstaging the Trump Reality Show

How Montana’s socialist ‘Plaid Shirt Guy’ hacked a Trump rally

It isn’t easy to upstage Donald Trump, but Tyler Linfesty -- a 17-year old high school student from Billings, Montana -- managed to divert attention away from the president at a recent Trump rally in his hometown. Linfesty became an immediate internet sensation on September 6 as he stood on the ...
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Upstaging the Trump Reality Show

A View from Berlin on the Mass-Shooting at Tree of Life

The anti-semitic and anti-advocate rhetoric surrounding the killings at Etz Chaim, Pittsburgh

We got the news of the massacre in Etz Chaim, the “Tree of Life” synagogue in Pittsburgh, while sharing an early dinner at home with friends. We were nine, and -- as it happens -- all Jewish: German, American, and with Israeli origins. The contradictory initial reports shattered the evening ...
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A View from Berlin on the Mass-Shooting at Tree of Life

Why Americans Aren’t Always Free — To Vote

A Short History of Voter Suppression in the United States

As the 2018 midterm election approaches, several states have passed new laws regulating voter identification, poll locations and hours of operation, and voter registration and eligibility. Advocates of these laws argue that such legislation is necessary to prevent voter fraud or simplify the voting process, while opponents contend that these laws restrict voter access and reduce turnout. Debates ...
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Why Americans Aren’t Always Free — To Vote

Remember Baudrillard

On the Ecstasies of Posthumous Communication

The last thing I expected was a reply. After all, he was dead. I emailed Jean Baudrillard one intoxicated evening, when the world was feeling too much for me. The idea came to me as a dark whim; somewhere between a compulsion and a negative epiphany. We had exchanged a couple ...
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Remember Baudrillard

‘To the Angels and the Sparrows’

A review of John Gray’s, Seven Types of Atheism

It was incomprehensible to Pascal, who lived in horror of perpetual oblivion and staked his happiness on the immortality of the soul, that an individual could be ambivalent in respect to eternity. Such a person, ‘indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness’, ...
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‘To the Angels and the Sparrows’

By Land and By Sea

Salvini’s war on immigration

The decree recently approved by the Italian government restricting the right to asylum is the terrestrial counterpart to the criminalization of NGOs operating in the Mediterranean. The climax to Matteo Salvini’s ongoing campaign against humanitarianism, it will have a fundamental impact on the management of migration within the country. Salvini’s war ...
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By Land and By Sea