From the Editors Archives - Page 16 of 171

From the Editors

American Dream

We celebrate Independence Day with quiet determination this year as we continue the fight for everyone’s freedom

July 3, 2020 • by Claire Potter

On July 3, 1776, the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress, many of them slaveholders, took a step over the void in the Philadelphia State House. Exactly one year earlier, George Washington, a veteran of the King’s service and now a General commissioned by rebels had taken charge of ...

From the Editors

How to Topple a Monument

And other thoughts about history

June 26, 2020 • by Claire Potter

On May 31, 2020, Sarah Parcak, an archeologist at the University of Alabama-Birmingham took the popular temperature and, like any good historian, recognized the need for a little public engagement. “PSA For ANYONE who might be interested in how to pull down an obelisk* safely,” Parcak tweeted, “from an Egyptologist ...

Interviews

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

June 24, 2020 • by Charlotte Slivka and Ted Hamm

Charlotte Slivka [CS]: Bernie’s Brooklyn is so much more than what the title would suggest. This book shows a deep love for the city and how politics and life are so tightly intertwined in our dense and crazy city. Are you from New York? Ted Hamm [TH]: No, I grew up ...

Bernie Sanders’s Socialism Is New York Born and Bred

Interviews

“Many Gay Men of My Generation Weren’t Planning to Die of Old Age”

Lambda Literary Award–winning poet Mark Bibbins on his new collection, 13th Balloon

June 20, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1989. “Real diseases are useful material.” In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag argued that the virus had been stigmatized as a plague, “a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others’ and as (potentially) ...

“Many Gay Men of My Generation Weren’t Planning to Die of Old Age”

From the Editors

What Is John Roberts Up To?

Voting with liberals in two important civil rights cases, the Chief Justice seems to be invoking a version of the Garland rule: award no policy victories in the last year of a presidential term

June 19, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Three days ago, the first pre-election blow to Trumpism arrived. In a 6-3 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch (a Donald Trump appointee) voting with the majority, the Court ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights act does make discrimination in the employment ...

Announcements

Land, Water, and Humans in the Bengal Delta

A Public Seminar Book Talk | Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta

June 13, 2020 • by Claire Potter

What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives ...

Land, Water, and Humans in the Bengal Delta

From the Editors

From Reaction to Reflection

We know that racism is structural–what vision for change will prevail?

June 12, 2020 • by Claire Potter

In 1962, James Baldwin described what it was like to make the turn from childhood to adulthood as a black man. His male peers, he wrote in the New Yorker, seemed lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was `the man’—the white ...

Feature

How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence

The movement fosters an environment of fear, hatred, and racism

June 9, 2020 • by Adam Quinn

In the aftermath of the killings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte at the hands of police, the Blue Lives Matter hashtag rallied around a video of a group of black youth attacking a white man and taking his pants off in a parking garage ...

How “Blue Lives Matter” Perpetuates Police Violence

From the Editors

#BlackLivesMatter

Like Killer Mike, we don’t want to be here — but we are. And we embrace it.

June 4, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Instead, we are shocked by how quickly the protest networks that have mobilized in response to George Floyd’s murder have won our hearts, and how completely they have compelled us to act. It caused us to pull together a second special issue in a row quickly. We begin with an address by ...

From the Editors

Can We Get Back to Politics, Please?

Covid-19 is an ongoing tragedy–and it’s time to get back to the business of taking our country back

May 29, 2020 • by Claire Potter

We at Public Seminar are picking ourselves up off the floor after the closure of our university and 100,000 deaths from Covid-19. It’s time to return to the political crisis that the virus interrupted. The Democratic administration we hope for in November will have to address the wreck that the Trump ...

From the Editors

The Last Monday in May

There are no parades, no baseball games, no parties, and we stay home all the time anyway: why should we care that it is Memorial Day?

May 22, 2020 • by Claire Potter

As Joan Rivers would say, “Oh, grow up!” First of all, let’s be clear: Memorial Day is not about you. It’s about honoring the dead, which would make you think it would be a more sober holiday than it usually is nowadays. And initially, it was. Memorial Day sprang from the practice ...

From the Editors

Begin Again

Good luck to all our brave, strong graduates from Public Seminar

May 15, 2020 • by Claire Potter

As The New School’s brand-new president, Dwight A. McBride, writes to lead off our issue: “I love commencement.” It is, as he puts it, “a sacred and ecstatic ritual.” We agree. One of the few graduations I have missed in my years as a college professor was in June 2008. ...