From the Editors Archives - Page 17 of 172

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. ...

Interviews

Hope, Revolution, and Survival

An interview with Morgan Parker

May 11, 2020 • by Masha Shollar and Morgan Parker

Masha Shollar [MS]: You’ve said that you trick yourself into writing by making yourself laugh. This collection is so intense and not one I would automatically think of as humorous, even though poems like “Matt” and “Brooklyn” for instance are, in ways, very funny. But they still had these dark ...

From the Editors

Running in Place

We are all living in Corona Time, where history seems to have stopped

May 8, 2020 • by Claire Potter

But now, since we all live in Corona Time, I think they might have done precisely that, at least at the beginning. I believe this because every day, for every person, is now shaped by Covid-19. The days are—sometimes pleasantly, sometimes numbingly—similar. We work. We eat. We read. We exercise. ...

Interviews

Art Making and Information

An interview with Katy Waldman

May 7, 2020 • by Ladane Nasseri and Katy Waldman

Ladane Nasseri [LN]: You wrote in a piece this year “the never-ending-ness of such a practice—of all critical practice, done right—is occasionally paralyzing.” As a literary critic, do you have a methodology to review a book in particular one that has been assigned? Katy Waldman [KW]: When a book is assigned ...

Body & Mind

The World Is Absolutely Full of Wonder

An interview with Mary Ruefle

April 30, 2020 • by Mary Ruefle and Gina Chung

In Dunce, Mary Ruefle examines death, endings, and our relationship to the everyday objects and rituals that remind us, even while they provide comfort and solace, of the fundamental frailty and uncertainty of life. We spoke recently by phone (the “Contact” section of Ruefle’s website states, wonderfully, that she does not own a computer and that ...

Event

Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World

A Book Talk with Jaclyn Friedman, Samantha Irby, Tatiana Maslany, and Sabrina Hersi Issa, May 4, 2020, 7:00-8:00 pm EDT

April 29, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Moderator, Claire Potter, co-Executive Editor, Public Seminar Jaclyn Friedman, author, activist, and editor of Believe Me Samantha Irby, New York Times best-selling author Tatiana Maslany, Emmy-winning actor Sabrina Hersi Issa, CEO of Be Bold Media, and founder of Survivor Fund This webinar is sponsored by Public Seminar, a journal of politics and culture based at The ...

Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World

From the Editors

The Most Beautiful Economy in the World

We saw it coming, but the collapse was swifter and more brutal than we ever imagined

April 28, 2020 • by Claire Potter

“It was a terrible relationship,” a pal of mine commented after a couple we knew suddenly announced that they were divorcing; “but I thought they would be together forever.” We feel that way about the whole house of cards that is the American economy. What has happened to our world three ...