“A Terrible Time”

A conversation with Camilla Fitzsimons about the ongoing global fight for abortion rights

When I was campaigning to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018, many older people were very, very, very welcoming of the referendum; they had somebody in their family who had had to travel abroad to get an abortion, or they had experienced or known women who felt they’d had too ...
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“A Terrible Time”

I Think of It as a Diary

An interview with Anne Waldman about her book Bard, Kinetic and a political life well-lived

Lindsey Scharold spoke with Waldman about where these themes overlap: where others intersect with memoir, where the spiritual aligns with the political, and where theory and practice meet....

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I Think of It as a Diary

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Documenting the City of Refugees

An interview with Susan Hartman on her new book about Utica’s transformation by refugees

I wanted to put in perspective what these refugees had gone through, what the countries they left had gone through, what the refugee camp experience was like. So, there is this part where I talk about when they were each on the run: it is very traumatic material and this ...
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Documenting the City of Refugees

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

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Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Interpretations of the Past

Historian Michael D. Hattem discusses historical memory, reckoning with the creation of “American history”, and his recent book

That put this question in my head: how, and when, did these British colonists, now Americans, stop thinking that the British past was their history? And how did they come to replace it with what we now call “American history”? That question then became the project’s overarching framework: reckoning with ...
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Interpretations of the Past