LIVE! Libraries, the Hamptons, and the Summer of Love
Past Present Episode 93
In this week's special live episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia debate funding cuts for libraries, the history of the Hamptons, and the legacy of the Summer of Love.
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Why Engage Public Anger
A reply to Chakravarti’s Introduction to ‘Sing the Rage’
“Sing the Rage” is a bold title for a bold book. It is no small provocation to thus entitle a book that argues for a more robust engagement with anger in public life in today’s democratic societies. The title is a further challenge for readers who recall the proem[1] to ...
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Media, the New Authoritarianism, and Its Alternatives Update
Teaching in Wroclaw, as liberal democracy is collapsing in Poland and beyond
I am exhausted. Conducting the seminar “Media, Publics and the New Authoritarianism” at this time, and in Poland, was intense, exciting, illuminating, and depressing. Coping with a combination of illumination and despair, I did not have the time or the constitution to properly digest what we were exploring together, and ...
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When Women Fight for Health Care
Before Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, There Was Midge Costanza
We are all still breathless from last week's near-repeal of Obamacare. As two Republican Senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, stood between the American public and a bill that would cut Medicare, defund Planned Parenthood, and throw the insurance industry into turmoil, keeping the consequences of ...
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The Failure to Repeal and Replace Obamacare
Trumpism as Extremism’s Endgame
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has failed to get his chamber to join the House of Representatives in passing a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He has handed President Donald Trump a major defeat that now tops the list of non-accomplishments of Trump’s failed presidency. In his daily ...
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Trump, Tweets, and the Dictatorial Mind
The Oxford English Dictionary defines dictation as “authoritative utterance or prescription . . . the making of a pronouncement. . . command.” It defines dictatorship as “A system of government by absolute rule of a single individual; a state ruled by a dictator.” Both words derive from the Latin word ...
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The History of Sexuality has a Jewish Problem
The Difference Religion Makes to United States History
Recently I had the pleasure of being a respondent at a conference in honor of Heather White and Anthony Petro’s respective path breaking publications Reforming Sodom and After the Wrath of God. Both books make crucial interventions in the history of sexuality and LGBTQ history, two fields that are only ...
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Black Bachelorette, White Mask
The Patterns of Subjugation and Oppression in Reality TV
There is no more popular culture, only ways of seeing populations as nothing.
-- Nina Power, Thirty-one Theses on the Problem of the Public
Like many faithful members of Bachelor Nation, I have long watched my favorite television show, The Bachelorette, with a healthy dose of irony. The sheer premise -- thirty-five ...
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Don’t Roll Back Title IX Enforcement
The Past and Future of Campus Sexual Assault Policy
The recent Title IX Listening Sessions of July 13 2017 sponsored by U. S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have prompted this week’s forum at Public Seminar. As part of the process, Secretary DeVos also hosted men’s rights activists who champion the cause of individuals claiming to be falsely ...
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Sing the Rage
Listening to Anger after Mass Violence
The words of Godfrey Xolile Yona, who appeared before the TRC in October 1996, exemplify the type of testimony that is the catalyst for my thinking about the significance of anger in testimony after mass violence and its relationship to restorative justice. Detained for his involvement with the anti-apartheid organization ...
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Creating City People, Not Just Maintaining Buildings
New York City’s Cultural Plan
Last week the city released its much-awaited cultural plan. The Department of Cultural Affairs undertook an unprecedented year-long process of surveying New Yorkers about arts and culture in New York, about what worked and what did not in the city’s creative life. Not surprisingly, equity and inclusion were repeated refrains: ...
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Mobilizing to Fight Trump’s Proposed Transgender Ban
Or, How I Got That Story, Volume LVIII
A few minutes later (and after I explained to the producer that I'm in Maine and off the media grid) I wrote an email to my editor at the New York Times, saying, If you want me to swing into action, let me know; I'll write a piece and file ...
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