What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between 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 ...
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What Can’t be Contained

Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Foucault

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

_____ 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 ...
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Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Foucault

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

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 ...
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How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

Donald Trump’s Lies

Why presidential falsehoods are part of United States political history

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” ...
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On Fascism, Non-fascism, and Antifa

Natasha Lennard in conversation with 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 ...
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The Foiled Confederate Coup of 1861

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

_____ 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 ...
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The Foiled Confederate Coup of 1861

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

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

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

“A Worldwide Mutual Pact”​

An interview with Wendy Brown

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 ...
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“A Worldwide Mutual Pact”​

“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

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