From the Editors Archives - Page 29 of 172

Blue Monday

How Much Longer Can Pelosi Keep Fiddling While Constitutional Democracy Burns?

What we need now is a Democratic leadership that believes in democracy.

June 17, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

It has been two and a half years since Donald Trump first took his presidential wrecking ball to America’s very flawed system of constitutional democracy. It has been more than two and a half years since the Justice Department -- the FBI, the Special Counsel, lesser federal prosecutors -- first began ...

Education

Accumulation by Education

White Property and Racialized Debt

June 14, 2019 • by Iyko Day

A key loophole that perpetuates both legal and illegal corruption is the outsized role that varsity sports play in the admissions process, widening the path to acceptance for predominantly white athletes in lacrosse, sailing, tennis, crew, water polo, and other “white sports.” Despite the perception that Black students are the face of ...

Feature

Collective Amnesia in Post-Communist Poland

Why history, not memory or mythology, is the path to Polish-Jewish reconciliation

June 14, 2019 • by Magda Teter

After WWII, many European countries engaged in what some scholars dubbed “collective amnesia.” Austria, for example, began to redefine itself as the first victim of the Nazis. France amplified the Resistance, forgetting about its Vichy days; Western Germany, after the trials of several high-profile Nazi leaders, allowed for silence to ...

Feature

How the North American Free Trade Agreement ruined Nourishment

A Review of “Eating NAFTA”

June 13, 2019 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso

Eating NAFTA demonstrates the urgency of responding to a clear and yet mostly invisible health crisis that manifests across borders. It offers tools for rethinking existing approaches to trade and food systems from a transnational, intersectional and structural perspective that shifts the blame that public institutions have placed on individuals (particularly ...

Education

Why Occidental College Revoked a 1929 Honorary Degree to White Supremacist Paul Popenoe

Confronting the legacy of eugenics in the United States and its ties to the founder of modern marriage counseling

June 13, 2019 • by Peter Dreier

In recent years, many colleges and universities have created task forces and programs to excavate their racist histories. These efforts explore their institutions’ financial ties to slavery; the racist views of some founders, faculty, and alumni; their admissions and hiring practices; and their evolving curriculum that, wittingly or unwittingly, reflected society’s white ...

Feature

A Ray of Hope

Romania’s Results in the EU Elections

June 12, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

In the case I know best, Romania, the elections demonstrated a sustained and even rising commitment to the principles of rule of law, the EU as a democratic institution, and trust in the possibility of launching new political parties. It is a case worthy of attention because it offers hope ...

Feature

A Regional Approach for Central American Asylum Seekers

The U.S. should pursue a policy that strengthens ties with neighbors

June 11, 2019 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

The White House leaked documents to the Washington Post yesterdaytrying to show that Mexico has in fact agreed to a significant crackdown on its southern border and that Trump remains ready to impose the tariffs, or insist on the safe third country agreement, if the numbers at the U.S. border do not decline ...

Feature

LIVE! The Stonewall Uprising, Jazzercise, and C-SPAN

Past Present Episode 183

June 11, 2019 • by Nicole Hemmer, Neil J. Young and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Fifty years ago this month, the Stonewall Uprising took place.Neil discussed the issues historians have raised with the treatment of Stonewall in popular culture.Jazzercise turns 50 this year.C-SPAN is 40, and beloved by many. Natalia cited Niki’s article at NBC about the virtues of the channel, while ...

Feature

Letter Two to Germany: Visiting Boston Under Trump

In March 2019, Berlin-based author Esther Dischereit observes the Academy Awards from Boston

June 11, 2019 • by Esther Dischereit

This article was originally published in German in Deutschlandfunk Kultur on March 20, 2019. It is reprinted with the kind permission of Deutschlandfunk Kultur. --- Today I was awakened by the sound of a snow shovel. A path had been cleared below on Harvard Street, which goes past the famous Harvard Campus. Whoever ...

Feature

A Different Way of Reading

Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein, and the Voices of Intuition

June 10, 2019 • by David Stromberg

It's not that I'd never tried before. But something had to have happened, it seems, to make it possible to read the novel -- and that something appears to have been a period of depression. The reasons were complex -- to repeat someone else's phrase, a cocktail of circumstances -- and I’m not ...

Feature

The People’s Vote That Ended Communism

Lessons from Poland on the role of elections

June 8, 2019 • by Jim Bjork

On June 4th, 1989, Polish voters went to the polls to elect new members to the national legislature. The election was designed to produce a managed, incremental modification of the Communist regime’s four-decade-long rule. Only a third of seats in the lower house (the Sejm) were contested, and the newly ...

Feature

We Broke Fallujah In Irreversible Ways

Ross Caputi on The Sacking of Fallujah

June 7, 2019 • by Ross Caputi

In this interview, we talk to Ross Caputi, the principal author of the book and a former Marine who participated in the second siege of Fallujah to explain the timing of the book, the military significance of the city and how it became a primary site of contemporary warfare. --- Public Seminar: ...