Jeremy Safran April 23, 1952 – May 7, 2018

Mourning the loss of a colleague, a friend and a gentle-man

This is a very sad day at The New School for Social Research and at Public Seminar. Jeremy Safran, a distinguished professor in our Psychology Department and a senior editor of Public Seminar, a dear colleague and friend to many of us, was murdered yesterday in his Brooklyn home. We ...
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Jeremy Safran April 23, 1952 – May 7, 2018

The Scab

One who gives more value for the same price than another.

"Such is the tangle of conflicting interests in a tooth-and-nail society that people cannot avoid being scabs, are often made so against their desires, and unconsciously"   [Although the author of this paper has been chiefly known to the readers of the Atlantic as a writer of stories of the Klondike, he has given ...
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The Scab

The Lies of War

Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War

Most everything one needs to know about Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s epic interpretation of the Vietnam War is evident in their summary of the conflict in the film’s eighteenth and final hour. “The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable,” declares narrator Peter Coyote. “But meaning can be ...
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The Lies of War

Why We Strike

An announcement from SENS-UAW Strike Committee

The New School administration has completely abandoned the progressive principles on which it was founded. Sidestepping demands from the community to declare The New School a sanctuary campus, the administration is engaging in widespread union-busting practices while shelling out millions for flagship buildings and fancy new fonts. With an ongoing ...
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Why We Strike

Primary Contests

Further thoughts on consonance and dissonance

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington In the coming week, millions of Americans will go to the polls on May 8 to determine which candidates will run in the upcoming November general election. The November election is particularly important given the ...
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Primary Contests

Black Aesthetic/Aesthetic Black

Race, Space, and the Possibilities of Becoming

How do we recognize blackness? Is it something we feel? According to recent data, medical professionals believe we don’t feel pain at the same intensity as white people, and therefore are administered less pain medication. Is it something we taste? Black culinary traditions are rooted in history and experience, but only a few ...
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Black Aesthetic/Aesthetic Black

Unstable or Low-Wage Jobs Make Up More than Half of Older Workers’ Job Growth

April 2018 Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

The Bureau of Labor Statistics today reported a 3.0% unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older in April, a decrease of 0.2 percentage points since March. While this number is low, we continue to hear stories of older workers struggling in the modern economy, such as Doug Schifter, a livery cab driver in ...
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Unstable or Low-Wage Jobs Make Up More than Half of Older Workers’ Job Growth

“Weaponized Babies”

Or, Damn, Why Didn’t I Think of Using That Term?

News that Senator Tammy Duckworth brought her baby to the Senate floor for a vote thrilled some and infuriated others. Prior debate over whether babies belonged in the Senate sparked some great pro- and anti-baby remarks that pundits and scholars will enjoy parsing and quoting in coming days, weeks, months… or until ...
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“Weaponized Babies”

The Democracy Seminar, Then and Now

An Invitation

We are imagining a forum for activists and thinkers who support democracy against the looming global threats of authoritarianism. The definitive feature would be openness. It would be a direct outgrowth of a small, international, at first clandestine, informal and improvised New School project, “The Democracy Seminar,” first proposed by ...
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The Democracy Seminar, Then and Now

Memory, Justice, History, and the “Right” to be Forgotten

Reflections on Georgetown’s Slave Legacy

For the past two years, since the publication of a front-page New York Times story on Georgetown University’s sale of 272 slaves, I’ve been following the saga how the university has dealt with this information. By way of context, Georgetown is one of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. When the Society of Jesus ...
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Memory, Justice, History, and the “Right” to be Forgotten

From Velvet Revolution to Velvet Dictatorship

Reflections on Democratic Regression

Let me start by describing how communism died. The first thing to perish was the communist faith. And this faith had two dimensions. It was a faith in the project of a just world, a world of solidarity and freedom. And it was a conviction that people had finally deciphered ...
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A Historian Obsessed With the Present

Political memoir changes the questions I ask of the past

If, at some point, a new diagnosis is announced that describes people who can't stop purchasing and reading books about the 2016 presidential campaign, I could be one of the first to sign up for treatment. I imagine that while wellness professionals will recommend some combination of meditation and exercise, ...
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A Historian Obsessed With the Present