Our Contemporary Political Landscape

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 ...
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The Theater of Impeachment

An interview with Brenda Wineapple

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 ...
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Populist Digital Media?

Social media systems and the global populist right discourse

But what is the role of social media in this? Participatory digital spaces or social media communication (SMC) should be viewed as a completely new communicative paradigm. This new communication system has made a radical shift in the way the media has been understood, upending established mass media assumptions in ...
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It’s Impeachment Season

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 ...
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A Penny for Your Thoughts

On capitalism, the nation and war

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 ...
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Perpetuating the Uribe Hegemony

How the Media helped to install and normalize Authoritarianism in Colombia

When they were finally allowed into the camp, the peasants found a hole in the ground and a few meters away, the body of Dimar, killed with a shot to the head. This assassination reactivated memories of the so-miscalled "false positives", or extrajudicial executions, that many of us in Colombia believed were ...
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Fake News, Conspiracy Theories, and New Media

Plan Andinia and Anti-Semitism in Argentina

Cuneo’s oral manifesto went viral across multiple platforms, such as What’s App, Facebook, YouTube, and endless email chains, sparking a public debate over Argentinean Jews’ sacred and exclusive loyalty towards Israel. Pro-Cuneo posts offered many cases of public figures, all of them Jewish, that were Mossad double agents or involved ...
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Could Turkey Just Be OK Again?

Media and the drift towards authoritarianism

Liberals in the U.S. were -- and some still are -- shocked. The election of Trump devastated the liberals’ American dream. Trump’s grotesque political style revealed that the U.S. wasn’t as awe-inspiring as the liberals imagined it to be. And yet, hadn’t they just elected the nation’s first black President? ...
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Read Slowly – If You Can

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 ...
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Welcome to the New Public Seminar

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

 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 ...
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Trump Is America’s Father, and Dad is Sick

America’s Toxic Parent

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 ...
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A Ticket for the Rome Express

A Strategy for Democracy

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 ...
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