From the Editors Archives - Page 123 of 171

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What Is The Purpose of Incarceration?

Introducing Year Two of an NEH Enduring Questions Course

October 4, 2017 • by Claire Potter

The question I chose was: "What is the purpose of incarceration?" The course is now in its second year, and this fall I am teaching it online. This is a very different experience from the onsite classroom (something I will write about in subsequent posts), but as part of the ...

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GIDEST: Wetness Everywhere

Water, fluidity, and scarcity

October 3, 2017 • by GIDEST

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, artist-in-residence, and doctoral fellows’ programs, we run a series of biweekly public seminars that feature both prominent and emerging scholars and practitioners. ...

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The Sound of a Thunder

Weatherman and the Music of Late-Life Regrets

October 3, 2017 • by Jeremy Varon

Meteorological images of all sorts -- with their implications of inevitability -- found their way into the narratives about the group. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather,” plucked from Creedence Clearwater Revival went a 1969 headline in the Underground Press about the group. And in a late 1970 communiqué called “New ...

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Adorno’s Freud in the Age of Trump

Part 1

October 2, 2017 • by Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle

Let us recall Freud's fundamental thesis in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In this text, Freud presents a general proposition about the process of constitution of collective identities. It is enunciated as follows: "such a primary mass is an amount (Anzahl) of individuals who have placed a single ...

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Global Histories of Capitalism Conference

A Conference at The New School

October 2, 2017 • by Aaron Jakes, Meghna Chaudhuri, Matthew Shutzer and Emma Park

Our conference aims to address the one-sidedness of the recent European and U.S. historiographic turn to the “history of capitalism” by providing one of the first venues to direct comparative investigations of emergent scholarship on the history of capital in the non-west. Our conference assembles a range of scholars from ...

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Kinneret Lahad Talks Singlehood and Time

An interview about her new book, A Table for One

October 1, 2017 • by Irit Dekel

What are you waiting for? Stop wasting your time. You will die alone. You will miss the train and stay on your own! These are just some of the questions and warnings that single women hear on a daily basis. Single women are constantly being asked whether they are ''still single,'' ...

Kinneret Lahad Talks Singlehood and Time

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The New Fascism Syllabus

Taking on hate one source at a time

September 30, 2017 • by Jennifer Evans

Modeled after other important exercises in academic activism like the #CharlestonSyllabus, the #ImmigrationSyllabus, and #Trump2.0 and 3.0, the New Fascism Syllabus comprises two syllabuses, one cataloguing historiographical selections on the global history of fascism, authoritarianism, and populism over the longue durée and another curating the best public intellectual missives penned ...

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Free Speech Matters vs. Black Lives Matter?

The Life of the Mind Online

September 29, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Yet, today, thanks to the President’s decidedly un-presidential performances, free speech once again is a broad concern of the American public, although the suffering of hurricane and fire victims has been unrelenting. As he exchanged insults with Kim Jong-un, increasing the chances of nuclear disaster, as the Republicans (thankfully) failed once ...

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Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

An excerpt from the new book

September 29, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Eight years after the end my Fulbright, at the beginning of April 1983, I return to Japan for ten weeks in an effort to connect to the world of the nineteenth century, return in an attempt to share experiences and feelings buried in the past -- theirs and my own. How ...

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Breitbart, Bannon, Trump, and the Frankfurt School

A strange meeting of minds

September 28, 2017 • by Andreas Huyssen

Breitbart's stated goal in creating the news outlet that bears his name was to attack the "Democrat media complex" with the help of the Internet and social media. Bannon, inspired by Lenin, Julius Evola (a darling of the Italian fascists and today popular with Greek neo-Nazis and Hungarian nationalists), and ...

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Burdens and Disruptions

The Continued Relevance of Sylvia Rivera’s Trans Latino Activism

September 28, 2017 • by Gabriel Mayora

Responses to this discursive effort were swift. Within 24 hours, both professional news sites and users on social media began circulating a 2016 report on military spending commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense that disproved the president’s allegations. This report showed that medical treatments specific to transgender individuals represented, ...

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Why Does a Historian Write a Memoir?

The adventures of a postmodern historian

September 27, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Aurell shows that professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, the bulk of them in the last few decades. "It is possible," he suggests, "that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals." Perhaps, then, my work ...