Interviews Archives - Page 8 of 11

Democracy

Confederate Monuments Are Not History

Like the contemporary war on “critical race theory,” these statues of the defeated prop up white supremacy in the name of a false past

June 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter and Karen L. Cox

_____ It seemed as though monuments were suddenly in the news during Donald Trump’s presidency, but they have always been controversial. Monuments to the Confederacy were contested by African American citizens as soon as they appeared after 1865. Black citizens understood these monuments for what they were: a rallying point for ...

Gender

Murder, Marines, and the Mojave

On the 20th anniversary of its publication, author Deanne Stillman contemplates the repercussions of her much-discussed book, “Twentynine Palms”

June 2, 2021 • by Bliss Bowen and Deanne Stillman

_____ If you live in Southern California, odds are better than even that you’ve heard about Twentynine Palms. Deanne Stillman’s 2001 book examines the barbaric rape and murder of 15-year-old Mandi Scott and 20-year-old Rosalie Ortega in August 1991 by a Gulf War veteran. The murderer was stationed at the nearby ...

Art & Design

What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

May 13, 2021 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

_____ In March of 2020, with the pandemic devastating New York and Queens being declared the “epicenter of the epicenter” it felt impossible to find words to describe the uncertainty, the losses, the distance. Over the coming months, Alexandra Délano Alonso gathered images and fragmentary language to hold what was (and still ...

Interviews

Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Foucault

Even if he did have sex with underage boys in a Tunisian cemetery in the Sixties

April 8, 2021 • by Andrés Gómez Bravo and James Miller

_____ This interview appeared in Spanish in La Tercera, a daily newspaper published in Santiago, Chile. It was prompted by the claims recently made by Guy Sorman on French television and in The Sunday Times that (as the Times’ headline puts it) “FRENCH PHILOSOPHER MICHEL FOUCAULT ‘ABUSED BOYS IN TUNISIA’.” _____ Andrés Gómez ...

History

Collars, Cuffs, and History Collaborations

With Welcome to Your Fantasy, a well-known history podcasting team takes on the Chippendales dancers

February 10, 2021 • by Claire Potter, Nicole Hemmer, Neil J. Young and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

"with that, this interview is history."...

Collars, Cuffs, and History Collaborations

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 ...