A Public Seminar Thanksgiving

Looking back, looking forward

In past years we have had some great Thanksgiving posts from Mackenzie Wark, Jeremy Varon and Jeff Goldfarb. Claire Potter, at her old Tenured Radical perch, used to occasionally give out awards to the top ten "turkeys" of the year: for a blast from the blogging past, you can see them here and ...
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The Death of Homo Economicus

A review of Peter Fleming’s latest book

Fleming takes up the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath. The tsunami metaphor has been invoked, particularly in the media, Fleming notes, as a way to frame discussions of the economic devastation and subsequent austerity that the crash has wrought on economies around the world. ...
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Can A Republican Have Progressive Values?

Bob Holden, New York City Councilman from Queens, says yes

Again, what's not to love? Well, since you asked... Mayor de Blasio, who won an overpowering mandate for a second term, does not love him. Last fall, Holden -- a lifetime registered Democrat -- primaried Elizabeth Crowley, a cousin of Queens Democratic powerbroker Joseph Crowley, and lost. Fair enough. But then ...
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After Hurricane Maria

Puerto Ricans Find Refuge in a Central Massachusetts City

Krysthina Ortiz refused to get up from a chair outside her school’s main office. Tears streamed down the 9-year-old’s face as she looked up at her mother, Krysthia Gauthier. “No quiero ir (I don’t want to go)! No quiero ir!” the girl cried. Gauthier leaned forward and wiped her daughter’s face with her ...
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Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...
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The Return of the “Forgotten Man”

Refurbishing symbols of the Gilded Age

Yet there is another sense in which we, in America, have been treading upon well-worn ground. Though many called the campaign and outcome of the 2016 election unprecedented, its roots lie, at least partly, in economic and social conditions which are by no means new. In his 2014 book, Capital ...
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How to Stop the Bleeding at New York’s Public Hospitals

Caring for the neediest and most vulnerable should be more equitably distributed

Serving more than one million New Yorkers a year, the hospitals and clinics of the New York City Health + Hospitals (NYCH+H) system play a key role in combatting illness and injury across the city. But fiscally, they’re in dire health themselves; in fact, they’re hemorrhaging money. The system’s operating ...
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A Woman’s Work

A Library of One’s Own

Read the news with a suffragist of 1913. Women’s rights advocates scanning the society page of the Atlanta Constitution on the morning of 4 June had a bevy of personas to peruse. There was the “Woman Shopper” gliding through a downy Eden of department stores: “Your presence, your influence and the wholesome atmosphere that ...
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Intellectuals—Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them, Part I

Re-considering the democratic roles of the intellectual as revealed this week in Public Seminar

Intellectuals have the knowledge and the experience required for people themselves to govern well. I am thinking of this today as I read the news and as I think about our work here at Public Seminar, drawing on my own long investigation of the sociology of intellectuals. My work on intellectuals ...
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GIDEST: End of Life

A nonfictional film

End of Life recently premiered at Doclisboa in Lisbon and will soon have its North American premiere at the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival. GIDEST is a Mellon-funded research institute based at The New School that incubates transdisciplinary research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design. As well as our faculty, ...
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What Happens Now?

Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

It’s a year after the American Election Day that shook the world, and a new book that seeks to explain the disaster of Donald Trump’s victory drops every few weeks. We political historians are scrambling to keep up. Last month, Hillary Clinton’s What Happened? hit the stands. How does it feel to ...
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