From the Editors Archives - Page 115 of 172

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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, ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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(un-)imaging

Or: why the blank page is a lure in imagining the new

November 27, 2017 • by Pierre Schwarzer

In a dark room, projected onto a wall, we see the hands of a man, dressed in black, on a wooden table. In crisp detail, we see him holding a page from a magazine, with some advertisement on it. Slowly, the page is being crumpled, we hear the whispers of ...

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The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man

Exploring the twisted personalities calling the shots in a culture where mean is celebrated

November 27, 2017 • by Mark Lipton

Mark Lipton – with rich experience as an adviser to major corporations, start-ups, government agencies, and not-for-profits – integrates years of psychological research to uncover what drives men in powerful positions to do dastardly things in order to fulfill their “visions”. Mean Men: The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man reveals the ...

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What’s the Point of a Creative Writing Workshop?

Writing and resistance in the Age of Trump

November 26, 2017 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Two days after the 2016 election, people arrived in my writing workshop talking non-stop. Their disbelief, grief, anger, and guilt at not ‘having done enough,’ ricocheted around the room. It was a challenge for them to focus on the page. In the weeks that followed, this scene repeated itself over ...

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Liz Smith, Interracial Friendships, and Roy Moore

Past Present Episode 108

November 25, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil debate Liz Smith and the history of gossip columns, whether interracial friendships are possible, and evangelical responses to Roy Moore’s pedophilia scandal.

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Liz Smith, Interracial Friendships, and Roy Moore

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Intellectuals—Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them, Part II

Are intellectuals really the enemies of democracy?

November 24, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

You threaten democracy. They hate you. They suspect that you despise them, as “they cling to their guns and bibles.” They know that you think you are better than they are. When they resent you and act upon their resentment, they too threaten democracy. We recognize that the anti-intellectualism of the less ...

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Monday November 27: Book Launch at The New School, 6 P.M.

Join us live, or for a live tweet, of Federico Finchelstein’s

November 24, 2017 • by The Editors

What is fascism and what is populism? What are their connections in history and theory, and how should we address their significant differences? What does it mean when pundits call Donald Trump a fascist, or label as populist politicians who span left and right such as Hugo Chávez, Juan Perón, ...