From the Editors Archives - Page 114 of 171

Feature

Culture vs. Anti-Culture

What kind of cultural commitment provides constructive alternatives to “Tax Reform,” Access Hollywood Denial and Birther-gate Revival?

December 1, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

As I sit down to write this post, “tax reform” is on the verge of becoming the law of the land in the U.S., giving to the rich, taking from the poor, disfavoring those who work to live (including some of the relatively wealthier among us). And as Jeremy Safran ...

Feature

Rethinking Academic Jargon

New tweets from an old culture war

December 1, 2017 • by Lora Burnett

This was, by and large, a well-received tweet. But there was some pushback from a couple of folks (okay, a couple of guys) who separately invoked the terrifying specter of "critical jargon" or "academic jargon" – without, ironically enough, defining what they meant. But whatever they thought they were saying, ...

Feature

Becoming a Candidate Too Soon

Trump year 1

December 1, 2017 • by Victoria Saker Woeste

I ran for office two years too soon. When I was in high school, my fantasy was to be a U.S. Senator. I became a historian instead and got involved in local politics in Indiana, where we moved in 1999. Indiana went blue in 2008, and despite the rise of the ...

Education

The War on Higher Education

Why tax reform is a clear and present danger to universities

November 30, 2017 • by Jeremy Safran

Although the media have provided coverage of this issue, they are understandably more focused on those aspects of the bill that will exacerbate the existing disparity between the wealthiest 1-2 percent of the population and rest of the country, a policy apparently based on “trickle down” economic theory that many ...

Feature

Life Sentences

Opening remarks from the Conference on Incarceration and the Humanities

November 30, 2017 • by N. D. B. Connolly

Now, you could imagine the horrors of a colonial prison in a black, economically depressed country like 1930s Jamaica, just as you can imagine the nightmare that the sound of wailing men might conjure in the mind of a nine-year old child like my grandfather. Even the most benign administrative ...

Education

Being a Woman is Work

How capitalist society (de) values ‘female’ labor

November 30, 2017 • by Judith Elster

This is essay is part of the OOPS course Law and Sexuality. The current division of labor has been perceived as equal for many, but remains impractical in the long term, especially in our contemporary capitalist America. The challenges that come with capitalism, such as inflation and recession, has forced each member ...

Feature

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

An excerpt from Steven Stoll’s latest book

November 30, 2017 • by Steven Stoll

— J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III (1782) This is an ordinary map of southern West Virginia, adorned with shapes representing private property. Some of the shapes adhere to watercourses. Others run ruler straight, throwing squares and trapezoids across innumerable hills and hollows. Distant investors ...

Feature

The Anxiety of Poetry

Interpreting the Jill Bialosky scandal

November 29, 2017 • by Sarah V. Schweig

The poem goes on addressing the dead: “You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,/ Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;/ Blind force with accomplished shape.” War starkly polarizes whole peoples into friends and enemies and has the power to twist human values: In ...

Feature

Translation Can Be a Peculiar Drug

Isaac Babel’s ‘Guy de Maupassant’ retranslated

November 29, 2017 • by Val Vinokur

Babel writes: “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You must turn it once, but not twice . . . I started talking of style, ...

Feature

Death and Taxes

While Trump shrinks the state, the tax reform bill wobbles to a vote

November 29, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Yet -- before we turn to taxes -- it is worth pointing out that, in addition to trying to pack the judiciary with conservatives, certain ways of doing nothing matter. That almost a third of ambassadorships and 300 top State department positions have gone unfilled, on top of the 2,000 jobs cut by ...

Feature

Mapping Climate Justice

Visualizing the Burden of Climate Stabilization

November 28, 2017 • by Julia Puaschunder

First, the principle of climate justice within a country. This means that, as each country moves toward accomplishing their climate justice goals, low- and high-income households should share the same burden proportional to their dispensable income as they do so. This principle can be realized through progressive carbon taxation. In ...

Feature

Between the Language of the Universe and the Universe of Language

An Interview with Val Vinokur

November 28, 2017 • by Josh Maserow

–Franz Rosenzweig On December 1st, the New School hosts a “Day of Translation: the Art of Losing and Finding” in Wollman Hall, beginning at noon with the launch of Ahmad Al-Ashqar’s book Advances in Embroidery: Poems, with Translations from at Mahmoud Darwish (Poets & Traitors Press); a 1:15pm Translators’ Reading and ...