From the Editors Archives - Page 21 of 170

From the Editors

It’s Getting Dark Out There

Thank heaven we all have a laptop and Public Seminar

November 13, 2019 • by Claire Potter

We are also interested in technology this month, with a terrific essay about digital infrastructure and smart factories from Birgit Mahnkopf: to read the second part of this essay, you’ll have to head over to our new friends at Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, a German web magazine in the Eurozine network. Look out ...

From the Editors

The View from Europe

And it ain’t good

November 5, 2019 • by Claire Potter

It’s refreshing to spend time in a place where everyone isn’t obsessed with the Occupant of the White House, but it’s also now strange to be in Berlin, a place where the United States was once so relevant -- and is now so irrelevant. A colleague from Croatia told me kindly that America ...

From the Editors

Our Contemporary Political Landscape

October 30, 2019 • by Claire Potter

This week we begin thinking about the present by contemplating about the past: senior editor Alex Aleinikoff looks to Auschwitz to understand why the Trump Administration deliberately inflicts suffering on migrants to the United States. “I will not enter into the discussion of whether the detention facilities to which children ...

Democracy

The Theater of Impeachment

An interview with Brenda Wineapple

October 29, 2019 • by Charlotte Slivka

BW: That’s a lot of questions! I had to have a sense of what the story was in order for the narrative could take shape. The entire book took six years to research and to write, but the story came to me after about two years into the research. In other ...

From the Editors

It’s Impeachment Season

October 23, 2019 • by Claire Potter

But we are all one country, aren't we? Because everywhere in the United States it’s impeachment season. Half the time at Public Seminar, we’ll believe it when we see it, but as of today, it looks like Donald Trump is finally on the ropes and taking a beating. Click here to ...

From the Editors

A Penny for Your Thoughts

On capitalism, the nation and war

October 15, 2019 • by Claire Potter

Our second pressing issue is nationalism – but with a twist. Reviving a roundtable discussion from last spring about Jill Lepore’s majestic survey of United States history, These Truths (2019), we ask: what is “the nation”? How do we study it – and who is included? Why do popular histories of ...

From the Editors

Read Slowly – If You Can

October 9, 2019 • by Claire Potter

We want you to come back to our new platform over and over again during the week, to savor the articles we have chosen for you, articles organized as a conversation about pressing issues. Go ahead: bookmark us on your device and your laptop. Now, every time you find yourself ...

Feature

Welcome to the New Public Seminar

Marking the New School’s centennial year with a refreshed platform and a renewed commitment to conversation

September 30, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, James Miller and Claire Potter

Everything you have always found at Public Seminar is still here. But we’ve redesigned the site to let you let you slow down, if you want to. Public Seminar’s commitment to discussing the pressing issues of our contemporary world also now includes a commitment to contemplation, to doing more with less, and at the ...

Feature

Trump Is America’s Father, and Dad is Sick

America’s Toxic Parent

September 30, 2019 • by Susanna Lee

The parent-child analogy does not presume that the state leader acts as parent, but that the state itself does. There has always been some overlap between state and individual when it comes to acting as parent to the people. Many heads of state are described in fatherly terms. It is ...

Feature

A Ticket for the Rome Express

A Strategy for Democracy

September 27, 2019 • by Andrew Arato

In Budapest, and shortly before local elections, some of my friends now speak of the Istanbul Express. As readers know, in that enormous city, followers of the slightly left Republican People’s Party (CHP), of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and a small nationalist grouping, “the Good Party,” united to ...

Feature

On Hate and Boycotts

How We Choose What We Believe

September 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

It took me about six months to start interacting with people I perceived as "white." It took me a lot longer to reflect on how I could so readily use the word hate. With time I realized it was because, where I came from, hating white people -- which mostly meant ...

Feature

On Postcolonial Remembering and Democratic Openings in Taiwan

An Interview with Former Political Prisoner, Fred Chin

September 26, 2019 • by Stephen J. Hartnett and Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge

Beginning with the infamous “228” massacres in the Spring of 1947, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) brutalized Taiwan with murder, torture, mass imprisonment, and relentless censorship -- this period has come to be known as the “White Terror.” The brave work of generations of activists led to the KMT finally lifting ...