The New Political Reality

Trumpism as White Minority Rule 

Okay, Trump is not Hitler: that is a less than perfect comparison. And the racists making robocalls are not the Brown Shirts or Storm Troopers of Kristallnacht. Those calls, however, are increasing in frequency, going beyond dog whistling to outright race-baiting, whether it is against African American candidates for Florida’s governor or ...
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The New Political Reality

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Technology in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis

“Every society creates its own world, internal and external, and of this creation technique is neither an instrument nor a cause; it is a dimension… an everywhere dense sub-set. For it is present at every point at which the society constitutes what is, for it, the real-rational.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the ...
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Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

I Believe Christine Blasey Ford

Republicans have no plausible argument about why Brett Kavanaugh is innocent

What will come of the allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen? As of today, it is not clear that Ford will testify before the Senate ...
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I Believe Christine Blasey Ford

A Kaleidoscopic Novel of Radiant Beauty

The new English Translation of Ondjaki’s Transparent City

To read the full review of Transparent City, visit the Johannesburg Review of Books – a trove of reviews, essays, poetry, photographs and short fiction from South Africa, Africa and beyond. In Cape Town, in the early nineteen-seventies, construction began on what would be known as the Foreshore Freeway Bridge. Designed with the intent ...
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A Kaleidoscopic Novel of Radiant Beauty

Bagel Capitalism

As we approach Yom Kippur, a day of both fasting and forgiveness, I wish to offer a sermon about food. Specifically, the bagel, which has become both a symbol and symptom of some of the worst aspects of American capitalism. Let me explain. Growing up in Plainfield, N.J. in the 1950s, ...
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Bagel Capitalism

Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Past Present Episode 146

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss the new reality show Making It, the 2008 financial collapse ten years later, and the death of Walter Mischel, the social psychologist who created the “marshmallow test.” Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Making It, a crafting competition show hosted ...
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Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

Critical Reflections in Lights of Peter Berger’s The Many Altars of Modernity

Given its association with the New School for Social Research, Public Seminar seems to me a fitting space for some critical reflections triggered by former NSSR faculty member Peter Berger’s last major work, The Many Altars of Modernity.[1] The book is significant in a dual sense. It recaptures the style and restates some ...
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Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

The Abortion Debate in Argentina

Or how men, priests, and the ignorant subjugate women

In the very early hours of August 9, the Argentinean Senate missed a historic opportunity to become the first Catholic-majoritarian country in the global south to legalize voluntary abortion. Instead, the upper chamber’s total rejection of abortion revealed three dynamics that prevent women from acquiring full citizenship rights, and which ...
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The Abortion Debate in Argentina

De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Read the introduction to this volume written by the editors

Self-examination and self-critique are the conduits to growth for psychoanalytic patients. Yet within the field, psychoanalysts haven’t sufficiently utilized their own methodology, or subjected their own preferred approaches, to systematic and critical self-examination. Across theoretical divides, psychoanalytic writers and clinicians have too often responded to criticism with defensiveness rather than ...
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De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Can a Right to Counsel Slow Down the ‘Eviction Machine?’

New York City’s push to help working class families from eviction in Housing Court

Earlier this year, The New York Times gave readers a revealing look at the workings of what it labeled “the eviction machine”: The city’s Housing Court. A series of articles detailed how a court system designed to protect tenants has been hijacked by landlords using eviction, or threatened eviction, often based on ...
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Can a Right to Counsel Slow Down the ‘Eviction Machine?’

Rise for the Climate

Shouting marchers took to lower Manhattan on 9/6 to protest Climate Change

Roughly a thousand people marched in lower Manhattan on Thursday, September 6 demanding that the world pay attention to climate change. This was the earliest in a series of climate marches around the globe to draw attention to a summit in San Francisco the following week. When people gathered in Battery ...
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Rise for the Climate

The Powerlessness of the Powerful

Living in post – truth, seeking alternatives, examining Nicolae Ceausescu and Donald Trump

This was most dramatically revealed in the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu on December 21, 1989. As this video documents. A mass rally in support of the leader morphed into a demonstration against the regime, apparently in a flash, though this was not as spontaneous as it appeared at first. In private, ...
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