From the Editors Archives - Page 17 of 171

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 ...

Announcements

Dance+Talk: Paramodernities Live!

Streaming performances with commentary, May 4-9, 2020, at 3pm

May 4, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

Questions frame the construction of Netta Yerushalmy’s monumental performance project, Paramodernities, which debuted in 2018. And from May 4-9, the questions and conversation will move online, with daily streaming of an installment followed by commentary and chat with noted theorists and artists. Yerushalmy pulled me into the project as the writer and a performer in ...

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 ...

Announcements

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 ...

Interviews

America’s Epidemic of Domestic Violence

An interview with Rachel Louise Snyder

April 28, 2020 • by Rachel Louise Snyder and LaVonne Elaine Roberts

LaVonne Roberts [LR]: You point out that most (54 percent) of mass shootings intersect with domestic violence. As a Texan, I grew up hearing about Charles Whitman, who, on August 1, 1966, after fatally stabbing his mother and his wife, killed 14 people and wounded 31 others. Is there any hope that convicted domestic ...

Democracy

Why Egypt Didn’t Get the Revolution it Needed

An interview with Peter Hessler

April 27, 2020 • by Peter Hessler and Michael Schmale

For American expatriates living in China in the first decade of the 2000s, Peter Hessler was already something of a household name, not just as the New Yorker’s China correspondent, but as a public intellectual. His books became fixtures of laowai bookshelves almost as soon as they were published. His ...

Why Egypt Didn’t Get the Revolution it Needed

Interviews

When Anthropology Overturned a Way of Seeing the World

An interview with Charles King

April 24, 2020 • by Charles King and Zach Schwab

Zach Schwab [ZS]: In the Acknowledgements section of this book you attribute the original inspiration behind it to a series of conversations that you had with your wife. I was wondering if you could elaborate on how that took place, and maybe the moment when you first realized that this ...