Interviews Archives - Page 8 of 10

Capitalism

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

December 10, 2020 • by Jeannette Estruth

By all measures we are living in an era defined by housing crises, a flood of human habitat destruction. The losses are both economic and environmental. Over 17 million people in 2018 alone were displaced from their homes because of climate change–associated disasters, according to the United Nations. Here in ...

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

Democracy

Donald Trump’s Lies

Why presidential falsehoods are part of United States political history

December 8, 2020 • by Eric Alterman and Claire Potter

Do Americans think presidential lying no longer matters? Perhaps a better question, journalist and historian Eric Alterman asks in his new book, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump is Worse (Basic Books, 2020), is whether it ever mattered to voters. Following in the tradition of Isadore F. “Izzy” ...

Interviews

On Fascism, Non-fascism, and Antifa

Natasha Lennard in conversation with James Miller

October 15, 2020 • by Natasha Lennard and James Miller

JM: Since you've written an entire book with the title Essays on a Non-Fascist Life, can you tell me a bit about how you chose that title, and what the term "non-fascist" means to you, in the context of those essays? We both know the appearance of the phrase in the context ...

Democracy

The Foiled Confederate Coup of 1861

An interview with historian Ted Widmer about his new book, “Lincoln on the Verge”

October 8, 2020 • by Claire Potter and Ted Widmer

_____ As Americans anxiously count down the days to November 3, 2020, President Donald Trump has been evasive about whether, should he lose, he would accept the results of the election. Commentators have rightly deplored this, arguing that the peaceful transfer of power has always been a cornerstone of American democracy. But ...

Interviews

Capitalism Hits Home: An Interview with Harriet Fraad

July 23, 2020 • by Harriet Fraad and Daniel Gaztambide

Dr. Fraad is a founding member of the Women's Liberation Movement in New Haven, Connecticut and she’s been a political activist since her high school days. She joined Daniel Gaztambide for a brief interview on November 11, 2019, on how capitalism “trickles down” into the intimacies of our relationships and ...

Climate & Ecology

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

A webinar view, featuring author Debjani Bhattacharyya and commenter Kasia Paprocki

July 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

The event was hosted and moderated by Claire Potter, co-executive editor at Public Seminar & professor of history at The New School for Social Research. Save the date: our next Public Seminar book talk is on Wednesday, July 22, featuring Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to ...

Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

Interviews

“A Worldwide Mutual Pact”

An interview with Wendy Brown

July 7, 2020 • by Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka

There are limits to the utility of theory in a crisis. So far, COVID-19 has not exactly occasioned a mass embrace of the mountains of leftist ideas—both theoretical and practical—that have been prepared for such a moment; instead, we’ve witnessed a hardening of the preexisting order, in which the old ...

Interviews

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

June 24, 2020 • by Charlotte Slivka and Ted Hamm

Charlotte Slivka [CS]: Bernie’s Brooklyn is so much more than what the title would suggest. This book shows a deep love for the city and how politics and life are so tightly intertwined in our dense and crazy city. Are you from New York? Ted Hamm [TH]: No, I grew up ...

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

Interviews

“Many Gay Men of My Generation Weren’t Planning to Die of Old Age”

Lambda Literary Award–winning poet Mark Bibbins on his new collection, 13th Balloon

June 20, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1989. “Real diseases are useful material.” In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag argued that the virus had been stigmatized as a plague, “a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others’ and as (potentially) ...

“Many Gay Men of My Generation Weren’t Planning to Die of Old Age”

Interviews

Hope, Revolution, and Survival

An interview with Morgan Parker

May 11, 2020 • by Masha Shollar and Morgan Parker

Masha Shollar [MS]: You’ve said that you trick yourself into writing by making yourself laugh. This collection is so intense and not one I would automatically think of as humorous, even though poems like “Matt” and “Brooklyn” for instance are, in ways, very funny. But they still had these dark ...

Interviews

Art Making and Information

An interview with Katy Waldman

May 7, 2020 • by Ladane Nasseri and Katy Waldman

Ladane Nasseri [LN]: You wrote in a piece this year “the never-ending-ness of such a practice—of all critical practice, done right—is occasionally paralyzing.” As a literary critic, do you have a methodology to review a book in particular one that has been assigned? Katy Waldman [KW]: When a book is assigned ...

Body & Mind

The World Is Absolutely Full of Wonder

An interview with Mary Ruefle

April 30, 2020 • by Mary Ruefle and Gina Chung

In Dunce, Mary Ruefle examines death, endings, and our relationship to the everyday objects and rituals that remind us, even while they provide comfort and solace, of the fundamental frailty and uncertainty of life. We spoke recently by phone (the “Contact” section of Ruefle’s website states, wonderfully, that she does not own a computer and that ...