Feature Archives - Page 56 of 150

Blue Monday

Both Directions Together

Improvising the greatness we need in these dark times

July 9, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington I’ve been writing the “Blue Monday” column for around six months now. Each week is a new situation, a new political experience to endure and a new writing challenge to surmount. In recent weeks I ...

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New School Histories Vertical

Announcing a new vertical for Public Seminar

July 9, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore and Julia Foulkes

Editors: Mark Larrimore and Julia Foulkes A school for the present. In 1918, the New Republic-based creators of what would become the New School for Social Research* called for a re-thinking of what higher education could be. Universities were hamstrung by backward-looking legacies and structures, both institutional and intellectual. Education needed to ...

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Redesigning The New School Histories Website

An announcement

July 8, 2018 • by Julia Foulkes, Mark Larrimore and Wendy Scheir

We are delighted to announce that we have re-designed the New School Histories website. The site features a more compelling design, a tagging system that brings together materials about particular topics, and an expanded search function -- all thanks to the website developer Katerina Vaseva, a New School alum. People is a collection ...

Redesigning The New School Histories Website

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Music by the Numbers

An interview with Eli Maor

July 7, 2018 • by Princeton University Press

That music and mathematics are somehow related has been known for centuries. Pythagoras, around the 5th century BCE, may have been the first to discover a quantitative relation between the two: experimenting with taut strings, he found out that shortening the effective length of a string to one half its ...

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On the Etiquette of Opposing Donald Trump and His Enablers

An up close view of the problem of civility, at home, looking abroad

July 6, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am not in Wroclaw, Poland today, but back home in New York. This banal observation may not surprise you, but it is a notable event in my life. Over the past 27 years, in the summer, I have gone to Poland to teach in The New School’s Democracy and Diversity ...

On the Etiquette of Opposing Donald Trump and His Enablers

Democracy

Democracy and the Uterus

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Bodily Autonomy

July 6, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

I was born out of a policy that forbade women to have control over their bodies until they raised 4 children. Under communist Romania, starting in 1967 and until 1989, many babies were born because women were refused control over their sexuality and abortion was made illegal. Most women wanted ...

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The Fall of the Brazilian Ancien Régime

A view towards the future

July 5, 2018 • by Sebastião Ventura Pereira da Paixão

All the groups that participated in the Brazilian redemocratization process have come to power. Yet, despite the promises, many hopes have turned to dust. Once elected, the policymakers disappointed with their unpreparedness, arrogance, or dishonesty. But there has been some progress, such as the stabilization of the economy and the ...

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Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

A review of Steven Zipperstein’s new book

July 5, 2018 • by Marci Shore

Steven Zipperstein’s new book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, is uncannily timely: today in particular we might appreciate the irony of fate that American anti-racism can trace one line of origin to a backwoods region of the Russian Empire. This region, Bessarabia, is among those parts of Eastern Europe ...

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We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

A Letter to President Trump

July 4, 2018 • by Claire Potter

On this July 4 I am in Poland, where President Andrzej Duda has just decapitated the judiciary, and Poles are, as I write, in the streets to protest the continuing theft of their democracy. Perhaps because of this, a stirring performance of Krzysztof Penderecki's "Polish Requiem" I attended at St. Mary's Cathedral ...

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Why Trump’s Battle with NFL Players Reveals His Racist View of Patriotism

Athletes have the right to express their political views

July 4, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

We can expect President Donald Trump to use the July 4 holiday as an occasion to whip up his political base by challenging the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with him. He’s been doing this ever since he announced he was running for president, but he’s reserved a particular brand of ...

Why Trump’s Battle with NFL Players Reveals His Racist View of Patriotism

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Sabotage as Environmental Activism

Why sabotage of pipelines is a justifiable and effective form of resistance to capitalism and climate change

July 3, 2018 • by R. H. Lossin

--Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value” (1970) On July 23, 2017, two members of the Catholic Worker Movement, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya claimed responsibility for sabotaging construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Iowa and parts of South Dakota. They had burned several pieces of heavy machinery ...

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Civility, Gays and Gyms, and Mr. Rogers

Past Present Episode 137

July 3, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil debate recent claims that the Left is destroying civility in politics, the LGBTQ+ history of American gym culture, and a half-century of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: When White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to ...