On James Baldwin and The New School

What It Means to be a Progressive University

And it is the local experts who field questions about Baldwin. The most recent request was from the university’s marketing and communications department to confirm that he had, in fact, been a student. The Baldwin estate had agreed that the university could quote him on its website but the estate ...
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Protestant Missionaries and Immigrant Jews

Cosmopolitan Allies

Countless Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians and other American Protestants were transformed by their experience in Japan, China, India, and the Arab societies of Western Asia. There, the missionaries encountered civilizations of intimidating complexity and power that had survived since antiquity. The same applied to a lesser extent to Africa and ...
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Rebuilding Democracy in 2018

Learning #purple politics from the history of American conservatism

In October, almost a year after the election that brought us Donald Trump, I was at the Library of Congress immersed in the archive of a man named Paul Weyrich, and thinking about the long aftermath of political catastrophe. Weyrich, some of you may recall, was a squeaky-clean political consultant ...
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The Reckoning

Sexual harassment, #MeToo, and the pain of radical change

But this is the only way, because threaded throughout our friendships and professional networks and communities and yes, even families, were agreements that were deadly to people’s bodies and minds and lives. Complicity, secrecy, denial, acceptance of the unacceptable -- all were woven into the fabric of our lives. There ...
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Caroling at the White House with the Seven Forbidden Words

Protestors sing for Trump’s impeachment

Some three dozen people gathered across the street from the White House a few days before Christmas to sing carols to President Donald Trump. A dozen were dressed in the red cloaks of the handmaidens from The Handmaid’s Tale. Their signs evoked recent events, such as the seven forbidden words. Others wore the ...
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Caroling at the White House with the Seven Forbidden Words

State Retirement Reform

Lifting Up Best Practices

In only six years, from 2011 to 2017: 40 states proposed bipartisan retirement reform to provide private-sector workers retirement coverage; 9 states enacted retirement reform; and 2 states have programs up and running. Since Trump's inauguration, 22 states proposed reform and Vermont signed it into law. In the 9 states that enacted plans, 3.5 ...
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Gray is Beautiful Revisited

On the Politics of Sex and the Crisis of Democracy at Home and Abroad

This week I am returning to my appreciation of the color gray, a theme I promised to explore regularly here, which unfortunately I have only returned to occasionally, and not recently. I am returning to the theme on this the darkest of days -- I started writing this during the winter solstice ...
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Poland’s Growing Authoritarianism

On Facing the Implications of Recent Events

In order to restore real justice, unlike the EU-enforced one, there are no holds barred; and just because something is written in law doesn’t mean it’s just. It doesn’t even matter that some of these laws were created during the previous 2005-2007 PiS-led government or that they were signed by ...
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Santa Claus Brings the 1% a Tax Bill

Did the GOP leave something under your tree? Probably not.

Not that the outcome was ever in doubt. As I have written before, tax cuts – especially for the wealthy and corporations – are the sine qua non of Republican governance: the essential reason the circus that is the Trump-McConnell-Ryan Express rolled into town. Unlike efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ...
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The Republican Tax Bill

How to Murder Higher Education

Higher education in the US, in general, has a particular structure. Universities have considerable tuition -- often higher than $30,000 per annum. Masters students usually receive some measure of a tuition waiver, and PhD and post-doctoral candidates often receive full or significant tuition waivers along with a stipend. These tuition ...
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