Playground Ambiguities

Unequal childhoods and imaginative play in an era of financialized capitalism

Rising up from a grassy knoll on the edge of the City of London, the naturalist wooden playground structure at Tower Hill Garden both blends into the park space and jolts the senses, lying as it does at the core of global finance. In dominant social imaginaries, nothing and no one could ...
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Playground Ambiguities

The Sculpture in the Stone

Preparing for adulthood the new old-fashioned way

William James’s Hard-Won Development Between Childhood and Fame How do we come of age? The Pew Research Center reports a steady increase over the last five decades in the number of young adults, aged 25 to 35, living with their parents. The percentage of young people “nesting” at home has almost doubled since ...
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The Sculpture in the Stone

I-dentity

Is trusted love ever an option?

Integrating Relational Psychoanalysis and EMDR: Embodied Experience and Clinical Practice provides contemporary theoretical and clinical links between Relational Psychoanalysis, attachment theory, neuroscience, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The author, Hemda Arad, delineates the ways psychoanalysis and EMDR can complement each other through a presentation of fundamental concepts and an ...
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I-dentity

So You Want To Be POTUS?

Avoid the disasters that long presidential campaigns produce

Checking my Instagram a few evenings ago, I saw that Senator Elizabeth Warren was live. I clicked. In a grainy video, I saw her striding out onto a marble plaza talking to an aide, her blunt cut blond hair swinging slightly as she strode into the darkness. The sound of ...
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So You Want To Be POTUS?

When Trump Met Putin

An Eyewitness Report of the Helsinki Summit

The evening before the Trump-Putin “summit” in Helsinki, I got on my white Finnish Jopo bike and went to see what was happening at the Hilton Kalastajatorppa in the seaside suburb of Munkkiniemi. It was extremely weird that Trump & Co. would be at my favorite hotel, just up the ...
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When Trump Met Putin

Agency, Order and Sport in the Age of Trump

Jim Thorpe, Jack Johnson, and the Sporting Middle Ground

It is all connected. Trump’s racist law-and-order politics, his criticism of black athletes, his newfound pleasure in the pardon, and his desire to be loved. His recent pardon of early 20th-century boxer Jack Johnson, who had been convicted of violating the Mann Act, reveals a fraught and complicated history of race ...
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Agency, Order and Sport in the Age of Trump

Argentina’s National Sport

On the uses and abuses of melancholic nostalgia

On June 30, fans of football all across ahe globe were struck (but not really surprised) by the defeat of an Argentine national team at the hands of an explosive France at the World Cup in Kazan, Russia. All across the world, Argentines and their sympathizers watched in sadness as ...
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Argentina’s National Sport

Thai Cave Rescue, Breastfeeding, and Fleece Vests

Past Present Episode 139

In this episode, Neil, Natalia, and Niki discuss the children rescued from a Thai cave, the Trump administration’s approach to breastfeeding policy, and the fleece vests that have become a staple uniform of the finance industry. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: A Thai boys’ soccer team ...
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Thai Cave Rescue, Breastfeeding, and Fleece Vests

The American Experiment

A Poem

If you work for the Department of Justice, quit. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, quit. If you are a border patrol agent, quit. If you are a contractor who builds detention centers, quit. If you sell vehicles to ICE, quit. If you are ICE, quit. If you sell tranquilizers to the Department of Justice, quit. If you write speeches for the Homeland Security Secretary, quit. If ...
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The American Experiment

Confirmation

Timing is everything in politics – and the fight against Trump’s SCOTUS nominee is political

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington In the coming weeks and perhaps months much political contention in the U.S. will center on the Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme ...
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Confirmation

Militancy and its Discontents

What the civility conversation gets wrong about activism

In early July, historian David Greenberg issued a kind of warning about the current state of American politics, the latest entry on the hand-wringing over civility on the anti-Trump left. He’s not alone: recently a CNN anchor chided a commentator for calling Stephen Miller, the ostensible architect of Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, a ...
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Militancy and its Discontents

Women March in DC to Protest Family Separation

A photo essay documenting the activism on June 28th

"We Care" "We Care" shouted a thousand women as they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capital. Organized on very short notice by WomensMarch, which brought millions of women to Washington on January 21, 2017, the march started at Freedom Plaza and stopped for a rally at the Justice Department ...
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Women March in DC to Protest Family Separation