From the Editors Archives - Page 23 of 169

Blue Monday

Is “Motherfucker” The Concept Political Science Now Needs?

An Immodest Proposal

September 9, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Is “Motherfucker” the concept that political science now needs? The question is a serious one. And the answer, I suggest in all seriousness, is “yes.” Kind of. We live in troubled times. The June 16, 2018 cover of The Economist stated the trouble clearly: “How strongmen subvert democracy.” The September/October cover of Foreign Affairs also puts it well: “Autocracy Now.” But ...

Feature

My Butch Career: An Interview With Esther Newton

Resisting gender conformity, coming out in the nineteen-seventies, and fighting for world liberation.

September 9, 2019 • by Theresa Smalec and Esther Newton

I interviewed Esther Newton about her new memoir, My Butch Career on June 20, 2019. Newton earned her PhD in 1968 and published Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972), the first major anthropological study of a gay-identified community in America. Though she researched drag queen culture and desired women sexually, Newton resisted the norms of ...

Feature

Twisted Logic

Polish conservatism and the ‘LGBT-free zones’

September 6, 2019 • by Beata Zwierzyńska

I live in a country where one of the worst atrocities occurred, the Holocaust, where Jews, Poles, Soviets, Romani, and gay people were killed. Declaring zones "free" from any human being brings an immediate connotation with the Nazi persecution of the Jews before World War II, the ghettos during the ...

Art & Design

Blood for the Future

The Northern Ireland “Troubles” in Les Levine’s Resurrection

September 4, 2019 • by Max L. Feldman

These events form part of the Holy Cross Dispute, a period of eight months of acute sectarian tension in Northern Ireland. During this time, Holy Cross Girls Primary School, a Catholic elementary school in a Protestant enclave of Ardoyne, north Belfast, was picketed by hundreds of loyalist Protestant protestors trying to stop ...

Feature

David Koch, Bedbugs, and Breaking Up

Past Present Episode 194

September 3, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Billionaire libertarian and David Koch has died. Natalia referred to Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article that first brought major attention to the political influence of the Koch brothers.Bedbugs are in the news these days with outbreaks at the Trump Doral Resort and the New York Times. ...

Feature

Commitment to the Bit

On Andrea Long Chu

September 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

The way to have the most fun with the writings of Andrea Long Chu is to read them as satire. Most of her texts work by taking some familiar habits of thought and pressing them to extremes, to the point where they disintegrate. Their virtue, as texts, is what Chu ...

Education

Language Matters

How do we teach classic literature if we cannot discuss offensive words?

September 2, 2019 • by Laurie Sheck

Since the spring of 2016, I have taught a seminar in the New School’s MFA program on writing and literature as radical questioning. As I put the syllabus together, I sought out texts that would challenge our most basic assumptions (for instance, that a novel has a plot; an author’s work must ...

Art & Design

Silenus’ Cup, Drained by AI

A Review of The Dead Walk into a Bar

August 30, 2019 • by Kanad Chakrabarti

Set within an ‘orbital facility’ in an un-specified future, the film opens inside a cavernous hall. The scene carries a strange echo for visitors to Steyerl’s show: a musty provincial gallery, sepulchrally lit, clad in dark wood -- that is, much like the Armory, where the entire work was filmed. ...

Feature

Against the “Diversity of Tactics”

Why Antifa Street Fighting Is Not a Strategy to Defeat Fascism

August 29, 2019 • by Leo Casey

As democratic socialists we have always been anti-fascists, because the essence of fascism -- its authoritarianism, its racism, its misogyny, its homophobia and its suppression of independent unions, political freedom and civil liberties -- runs completely counter to the principles and moral values that are most important to us. The ...

Feature

Kashmir’s Silent Suffering

New Anguish in the Midst of an Old Struggle

August 28, 2019 • by Bizaa Zeynab Ali

In the meanwhile, Kashmir has been placed on a Genocide Watch and the UN has publicly called out India’s “Draconian Blackout” as a “collective punishment” for the people of Kashmir. with numerous people being killed and more than 4,000 people, mostly young men, being arrested and held without recourse under the Public Safety Act (PSA), a controversial law ...

Feature

Reproduction At The End Of Humanity

Refusing Apocalypse and Dismantling The Threat Of The New

August 28, 2019 • by Faith Taylor

My interest in this growing sense of reproductive unease has been nourished by research into the impact of housing insecurity on millennials’ intimate lives. Here, generational inequality generates feelings of thwartedness across a range of experiences -- romantic partnerships are doomed by the inability to leave a parental home, barriers ...

Feature

The Dilemma of Black Citizenship

Perpetual Partiality and Patriotism

August 23, 2019 • by Kristopher Burrell

"I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”James Baldwin, Notes from a Native Son The concepts of universal equality and suffrage have historically provided the necessary openings for those who are not rich or white ...