From the Editors Archives - Page 140 of 171

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Secrecy and the Conspiratorial Mindset

How the secrecy we’re told protects our democracy is in fact breaking it down

March 31, 2017 • by Steve Cucharo

If there is a phrase in the entire essay that explains our current predicament as it relates to conspiratorial thinking and the advent of the “post-truth age” it might be this one. While it is common to think of the conspiratorial mindset as a cognitive deficiency, as a by-product of ...

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Misrepresentation and Misrecognition

Steve King’s American Exceptionalism and its Ties to the “Slaves were Immigrants, too” Thesis

March 30, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

I don’t want to spend much time on King’s comments themselves, but let’s note here the way that “American civilization” is equated with “Western civilization”. Let’s also note that other civilizations are inferior to this civilization, precisely because other civilizations “produce very little freedom,” while “our” superior civilization produces more. ...

Education

Confronting the Corporate University

From Cold War Federalization to Financialized Higher Education

March 29, 2017 • by Robert Meister

Thank you for inviting me. GSU has asked me to speak more biographically than I am accustomed to speaking about my experience and particularly about the relationship between my experience as a graduate student, unionizing graduate students in a private university, and how that bears on my experience as an ...

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To Write Poetry after Auschwitz is (NOT!) Barbaric

A lecture prepared for presentation at the University of Virginia

March 27, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am very pleased to join you today and share my reflections on the importance of, not only poetry, but art more generally, as it helps us confront the social condition of collective memory in dark times. I am especially grateful for Irit Dekel’s invitation to give this presentation. First as ...

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Why Don’t You Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer)?

A Few Thoughts About Women in History

March 26, 2017 • by Claire Potter

But I have a few other words to say first. It is, perhaps, very difficult for much younger women to know how very tight we who went to graduate school in the 1980s were -- and remain -- with our foremothers. Part of this had to do with entrenched sexism: by ...

Education

Exile from Exile

Make the University in Exile a Sanctuary

March 24, 2017 • by Soheil Asefi

As an independent journalist in Iran, I never thought there would be a day that the paws of state would deprive me of the possibility of returning to the country where I was born and raised. After ten years of professional experience in major Iranian media outlets, I was arrested ...

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Review of Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party

On Collectives, Communicative Capitalism, and Suspension of the Individual Ego

March 23, 2017 • by Luke Mergner

Nowhere was this sense more palatable than in Zucotti Park, where the #OccupyWallStreet protesters set up camp. It was a moment when, especially for the Left, the world paused as if the railroad switch of history might suddenly direct the country on a new, more equitable track. Six years later, even ...

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International Women’s Day

March 8, 2017: Something old, something new, much was borrowed, nothing blue

March 22, 2017 • by Jo Freeman

Women all over the world marched, rallied, and demonstrated in solidarity to commemorate International Women's Day. While the tradition was established a century ago, never before have so many women demonstrated in so many places in so many countries. To show solidarity, women wore red, whether they were demonstrating or ...

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Critical Design

By Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby

March 21, 2017 • by GIDEST

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are professors of Design and Emerging Technology at The New School and partners in the design studio Dunne & Raby. They use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing ...

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Order from Noise

On Cambridge Analytica, Cybernetic Governance and the Technopolitical Imaginary

March 20, 2017 • by Felix Maschewski and Anna-Verena Nosthoff

[No means is just a means.] – Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution “Die Stille ist das Kind der Mechanisierung; und das Unberührte der ungeheure Rest, der übrigbleibt, wenn die Menschheit sich darauf beschränkt, auf vorgeschriebenen Straßen zu fahren oder gar auf Geleisen.” [Silence ...

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Were Donald Trump’s 2005 Taxes News?

A Report from Clickbait Nation

March 19, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It seems that those who chose to watch Maddow may have felt the same way. As it turned out, Rachel had two 1040 summary pages from Trump's 2005 return, via journalist David Cay Johnston of DCreport.org, who had received them anonymously (morning speculation is that they were deliberately leaked by the ...

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Trump’s Call to Order

The Politics of Resentment

March 17, 2017 • by Santiago Zabala

Throughout the twentieth-century other thinkers drew on Popper’s intuition to stress a common opposition to the universalistic aspirations of modernity: fundamental political, moral, and cultural concepts functioned to denigrate and marginalize others who didn’t measure up to its criteria of rationality. This aspirational rationality was responsible not only for twentieth-century ...