Triangulation is the Not-So-New Black

Party Coalitions, Racial Scapegoating and the Carceral State

Bill Clinton vilified African-Americans with his draconian crime bill while pushing for economic deregulation policies that he hoped would woo Republicans while also not upsetting the labor base of the Democratic Party too much. By the time Obama came around, African-Americans went from being vilified by the Democratic Party to ...
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Who Goes to Jail for Sex Crimes?

Weiner’s sentencing should be a wake-up call

Despite his plea to serve his time as a suspended sentence, he will spend 21 months incarcerated for sexting with a 15-year-old. In a series of exchanges, he cajoled her into undressing and touching herself on Skype, and then sent her explicit messages about what he would do to her ...
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Full Frontal Feminism

Why Billie Jean King Made History in the Battle of the Sexes

If only the 2016 election had turned out so well. “The Battle of the Sexes” puts its politics -- both feminist and sexual -- front and center, which is rather remarkable for a mainstream Hollywood offering. King takes on the male tennis establishment, personified by unctuous tennis promoter and former champion ...
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A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time

An extract from Kinneret Lahad’s recently published book

From Chapter 4, ‘Facing the horror: becoming an “old maid”’ Age and Singlehood In her analysis of single women in popular culture, Anthea Taylor (2012) proposes that the study of single women opens a window on how heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks operate in new and sophisticated ways. Inspired by Taylor’s study, I ...
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A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time

Reading Adorno on Fascism in the Age of Trump

A New School roundtable

In an era marked by the rise of a paradoxically international right-wing populism, and in the midst of ethno-nationalist tumult in the United States, this roundtable reflects on the legacy and contemporary utility of “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” Might Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists still have something ...
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Confronting Fundamental Problems of the Human Condition and Pressing Problems of the Day… by any means necessary

Four years of Public Seminar

Now many fine colleagues have joined the project, as we had hoped would happen. Their creative imagination, experience, scholarship and commitment have made it what it is today and what it promises to be tomorrow. Claire Potter and I oversee the operations in adjoining offices, across from The New School ...
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Memory and Kent State

The Past is Always Present on May 4

I fell into the field of communications by default because I took a debate class at Miami from a professor who turned out to be chair of the department. I was an English major looking for an easy minor. No one could have been more surprised than I that the ...
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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women

Sept. 30, 2017 DC

Black Women First! Black Women First! Shouted several thousand people as they marched up Pennsylvania Ave. from the Capitol on September 30.  They were leading two marches, which started at two different points on Capital Hill before joining to march to the Department of Justice on 10th St. There they planned to turn south to go to ...
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March for Racial Justice and March for Black Women