Financing the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy

Report and Response

Once per semester, SCEPA sponsors an event relating to climate change policy and invites some of the most notable names in climate modeling and/or policymaking to give their perspectives on recent developments in climate change scholarship. This most recent event featured Dr. Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Dr. Paolo Galizzi. Dr. Nakicenovic, ...
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Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s Fate

A response to Keval Bhatt

In a stirring, passionate, and bracingly clear recent contribution to the ongoing Charlottesville thread in our “Power and Crisis” vertical, University of Virginia student Keval Bhatt accounts for his decision to join others in shrouding the famous, indeed iconic, statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the University. I ...
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Before Charlottesville

An interview with Carolyn McAllaster on the Greensboro Massacre of 1979

Carolyn McAllaster, the Colin W. Brown Clinical Professor of Law and director of the HIV/AIDS Policy Clinic, said the events in Charlottesville and the president’s response to them sparked memories of the Greensboro Massacre in which five protestors died and 11 were injured even before news of the apology broke. ...
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John Kelly Is a Present Danger to the Republic

With all due respect

Kelly spoke at length about the sacrifices of fallen soldiers, the duties of their military superiors, his own experiences as a commander and also as the father of a fallen soldier, and the advice he supposedly gave to Trump about how best to convey condolences to the families of fallen ...
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Neoliberal Horizons in Subjectivity

An excerpt from Jorge Alemán’s latest book

It’s definitive to admit that when it comes to the symbolic order of language, in its distinct variants and modes of appearance, we must always distinguish two different dimensions. Firstly, we must indicate the “dependence and subordination” of the speaking being, with respect to the structural and ontological order of ...
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Act One of Turkey’s Post-1980 Political Drama

The mysterious clearing of Turkey’s political stage

Given this depiction of the present, it would be surprising to learn that AKP’s first electoral victory happened somewhat by accident. In the uncut version of the post-1980 Turkish political drama, AKP is the second of two acts. It is Act One, not Act Two, that made the party’s hegemony ...
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Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...
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Adorno with Freud, Adorno Beyond Freud

Part 4

“Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” is a strange text. It presents itself as a dynamic interpretation of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which, in its turn is, also, according to Adorno, a “dynamic interpretation” of Le Bon’s description of the mass mind.[1] It ...
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What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany

An excerpt from Jonathan Bach’s latest book

Introduction The GDR never existed.” Nonsense, of course -- the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany, existed for forty cold war years as the front line of the Soviet Bloc, as West Germany’s socialist double and as a lived reality for sixteen million people. Yet, eighteen years after German unification in 1990, ...
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Why Do You Call Us Ladies?

History, gender, and manners in public life

Consider the story of Abigail Adams and her most famous quote. When Abigail Adams asked her husband John to “Remember the Ladies” as he drafted the Declaration of Independence, she was not advocating for the rights of American women who were predominantly poor, indentured, and enslaved. Rather, she called specifically ...
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The Infant King and Washington’s Tripartite Soul

Freud, Plato, and Trump

In 1933 Charles Laughton won an Oscar for Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. It is a bravura performance, worth revisiting. Laughton’s Henry runs around like a child who just learned how to walk. He gropes, screams, whines, and eats like a baby playing with his food. His temper ...
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