From the Editors Archives - Page 129 of 172

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The Body in Space/Trauma in the Body

A Review of Roxane Gay’s ‘Hunger’

August 17, 2017 • by Lynne Peskoe-Yang

Roxane Gay’s first book-length memoir, Hunger, is about space: the space that certain bodies are allowed to occupy, and the world’s response when they are unable or unwilling to fit inside it. In tender, explosive prose, Gay writes of the systemic medical dismissal and the social and sexual ostracism that ...

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Loss Beyond Destruction

Charlottesville reveals the failures of loss

August 17, 2017 • by Jared Loggins

“Get out, get out,” the person screams, the space in between the bangs growing closer and closer together as the warning continued. The apartment building is on fire. My brother, my parents, and I are all home and luckily we are able to hear the warning. We gather some essential possessions ...

Education

Teaching History in the Trump Era

Confessions of a Snowflake

August 16, 2017 • by Gautham Rao

One day in my small undergraduate historiography seminar a few years ago, one student said something really offensive to another student. I can’t really repeat the offending sentence, but it involved a racist aspersion toward a student of color and the offender invoked the name of then-candidate Trump as he ...

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White Identity and Terror in America

Thinking about the Events of Charlottesville

August 16, 2017 • by Melvin L. Rogers

This is a very dangerous moment. For so long, those on the left have been criticized by the right for talking and speaking in the language of identity. And yet identity talk has typically been deployed by the left to highlight those that have been excluded, marginalized, and dominated. It ...

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What Makes Reasonable Force Reasonable?

Conceptions of Virtuous Rationality

August 15, 2017 • by Louis Colombo

In a recent essay published by Public Seminar, I argued that we should rethink the appeal to fear as a motive and justification for the use of force by police officers. Although I concluded that fear should not be seen as a legitimate defense of an officer’s decision to use force, my ...

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Nuclear Crisis — Or Nuclear Theater?

Comparing the Cuban Missile

August 15, 2017 • by Richard D. Anderson

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sound judgment and self restraint of President John F. Kennedy, ably advised by his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, supposedly saved the world from the nuclear war advocated by hawks like Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay. But that triumphalist story is ...

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Defending Abortion Without “Rights”

A Review of Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason

August 14, 2017 • by Juniper Alcorn

In Foucault’s Futures, Penelope Deutscher stages critical discussions between Foucault and his critics and intellectual descendants, bringing reproduction into focus as an issue of biopolitics. The “future” of Foucault is contained in two questions: first, in what sense is reproduction present in Foucault’s work and how has it eluded or ...

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How to Survive a Nuclear Attack

A Practical Guide from the 1950s

August 14, 2017 • by Claire Potter

With all the cheerful talk last week about a nuclear confrontation with North Korea, a number of people in my social media feeds have been obsessing about how much our collective civil defense skills have eroded since the 1960s. However, a quick trip to the National Archives digital collections has ...

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Charlottesville and Trump

David Duke Explains Neo-Nazi Violence to You

August 12, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

There is fire and fury today on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. Neo-nazis and white supremacists, some bearing guns, are violently protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee and attacking anti-racist counter-protestors. David Duke has declared that this is the fulfillment of President Trump’s vision for America. “We are determined ...

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Substantive Populism

Against the devaluation of a term

August 11, 2017 • by Federico Finchelstein

In this article, Professor of History Federico Finchelstein argues that, despite its overuse and conceptual stretching, the category of populism is worth preserving if we want to understand our current political moment. The original Spanish version of this article can be found at Argentina’s newspaper Clarín. This piece was translated by ...

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“What the Foucault !?!” (The Fourth Edition of “Waiting for Foucault”)

On Structure and Event

August 10, 2017 • by Marshall Sahlins

Here's some intellectual diversion from the impending nuclear catastrophe: It's from the forthcoming "What the Foucault !?!"(The fourth edition of "Waiting for Foucault") Structure on one hand, agency and contingency on the other, are not opposed historical determinants in the sense that they exclude one another. On the contrary, each is ...

“What the Foucault !?!” (The Fourth Edition of “Waiting for Foucault”)

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What Are the Costs of Libertarianism?

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, Revisited

August 10, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: the Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking Press, 2017.) Democracy in Chains, historian Nancy MacLean's account of James McGill Buchanan and public choice economics, has caused an unusual stir in the few months since its publication. You may have followed the lengthy ...