Feature Archives - Page 64 of 150

Blue Monday

Why There Can Be No Democratic Left Without an Energetic Left

Some thoughts on disagreement

May 21, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington A number of pieces have come across my screen in the past week commenting, critically, on the way "the radical left" has responded to Trump. One, published in the Washington Post, announced boldly that "The Far Left ...

Why There Can Be No Democratic Left Without an Energetic Left

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Anti-Semitism Was Not Just a Smokescreen

The Jewish part of Poland’s 1968

May 21, 2018 • by David Ost

This piece is being simultaneously published in Polish by Kultura Liberalna. At its recent commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1968 protests at Warsaw University, the Law and Justice (PiS, in Polish abbreviation) government of Poland presented its official line: that 1968 was a “Polish national social movement against communism,” ...

Anti-Semitism Was Not Just a Smokescreen

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Royal Wedding Roundup

Princesses, tiaras, bunting, ex-girlfriends, and ludicrous hats

May 20, 2018 • by Claire Potter

At Public Seminar we are feminists, so we don't raise our daughters to be princesses. We are open-minded leftists, so we don't fawn over the ruling classes, but we don't long to guillotine them either. And we are anti-racists, so we haven't declared an end to racism worldwide just because a ...

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Child Welfare and the Intended Consequences of the War on Drugs

The devastating impact on communities of color

May 19, 2018 • by Aarin Michele Williams

In order to properly understand the child welfare system we must grasp its connections to race, class, drugs, and reproduction. Many recognize that our nation’s shameful mass incarceration rates are fueled by our long carceral history and the infamous “war on drugs” with its intentional targeting of Black and Brown communities and impoverished people. We know ...

Child Welfare and the Intended Consequences of the War on Drugs

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The Banality of Evil and the Death of the Author

Thoughts on social interaction, and questions of individual recognition and responsibility

May 18, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I hope we can agree: we are not alone, and even when we are alone, we are not alone. We humans are what we are as we interact with each other: no interaction, no person; no interaction, no politics; no interaction, no art, science and love; no sex and no ...

The Banality of Evil and the Death of the Author

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The Future of Our Past

Digital archives and the democratization of knowledge

May 18, 2018 • by Sharon Ringel

Usually, when I tell my students that our course will focus on archives, they almost fall asleep in front of me. In fact, it seems that the mere mention of the word “archive” triggers a yawning reflex. People imagine the archive as a far, distant, dark and dusty space, where ...

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The Death of the Author

Historians and Citation

May 17, 2018 • by Brian Connolly

Why should journalists, or anyone else, cite historians explicitly? “Many historians,” Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz writes in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “have become familiar with the feeling of anonymity as their work gains attention from the news media.” The historians at the center of the article – Danielle McGuire, Heather Ann Thompson, and James ...

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GIDEST: The Tar Sands Songbook

The work of Tanya Kalmanovitch

May 17, 2018 • by GIDEST

In her documentary play The Tar Sands Songbook, musician, ethnomusicologist, Associate Professor at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, and 2017-18 GIDEST fellow Tanya Kalmanovitch uses strategies from the creative and performing arts, ethnography, and design to invite participants into an imaginative, critical process of unnerving the intimate relationship of oil ...

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Elections Turn On Policy, Not Public Relations

To win back the House, Democrats need to show how they will make change

May 16, 2018 • by Claire Potter

My liberal and left-wing friends continue to puzzle over a single, unanswerable question: why do white, working class people vote "against their interests"? Perhaps the reason that this is an unanswerable question is that it is the wrong question. I would like to suggest that they don't vote against their ...

Elections Turn On Policy, Not Public Relations

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Poetry’s Intrinsic Ontology of Change

Plasticity, Translation and the Work of Catherine Malabou

May 16, 2018 • by Allison Grimaldi-Donahue

The fragmentation of deconstruction can feel liberating, a rush of loosed energy. But it can also feel untethered, endless; panic inducing. While it allows for each of us and our writing to be multiple, it also prevents us from ever feeling grounded. Plasticity as a driving method in translation allows ...

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“Bloody Gina,” the CIA, and the Senate

Why Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing was a democratic farce

May 15, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

Growing up near Washington, D.C., I developed a child’s awe at the city’s great temples of democracy: its monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson; the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence is housed; the Capitol Rotunda; and even the modern, workaday offices of Congress where the people’s business is done. ...

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“Enjoy without Restraint!”

Fifty Years Ago in Paris

May 15, 2018 • by Sergio Benvenuto

This is an introduction to an in-depth narrative recollection on one of the most significant episodes of the 20th Century, May 1968 in Paris, from one of its participants, famed psychoanalyst Sergio Benvenuto. The full essay can be found here. This is the first time this essay has been published ...