From the Editors Archives - Page 32 of 170

Feature

Trump’s Emergency Is Part Of A Theatrical Tradition — And Congress Plays A Starring Role

In America, emergencies are normal. Whether they are real or not doesn’t seem to matter.

May 10, 2019 • by Ian Zuckerman

We in the United States are living under a state of emergency. But that’s nothing new. President Trump recently declared an emergency on the U.S./Mexico border, explaining that this was the quickest way to access funds for border wall construction that Congress had refused to appropriate. Some weeks later, Congress passed a ...

Trump’s Emergency Is Part Of A Theatrical Tradition — And Congress Plays A Starring Role

Feature

“who is this woman?”

A poem by Solange Claws

May 10, 2019 • by Solange Claws

We are proud to introduce Huddled Masses, a journal of writing and arts on the themes of Migration and Mobility sponsored by the Zolberg Institute and published in partnership with Public Seminar. Our goal is to provide the middle ground, to bridge the gap between the academic journal and the news, to raise ...

Feature

Left Melancholy, Neoliberalism, and the Investee Condition

An interview with Michel Feher, author of Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age

May 10, 2019 • by Michel Feher

Public Seminar (PS): What motivated you to write Rated Agency? Michel Feher (MF): Well, three motivations probably. The first one, which is the longer one, comes from reading many years ago Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism and then thinking through that from the Foucauldian perspective but also realizing soon that these lectures were delivered ...

Left Melancholy, Neoliberalism, and the Investee Condition

Feature

Feelings-Positive and Glamour-Obsessed: An Interview with Ben Fama

The New School poet’s forthcoming collection, Deathwish, examines the alienation of post-Internet life.

May 9, 2019 • by Ben Fama and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

Death interviews me about my apparel, asks who I’m wearing, who I’m looking forward to seeing tonight. Not having had voice lessons or PR coaching, my answers fall flat. —Ben Fama, “The Function of Fantasy in the Lacanian Real” Welcome to Ben Fama’s Deathwish, a poetry collection that catalogues a world where “evil ...

Feelings-Positive and Glamour-Obsessed: An Interview with Ben Fama

Feature

On These Truths

History can’t save the world. It can’t even save democracy. But it can offer hope.

May 9, 2019 • by Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore's response was originally published on May 9 2019. The day I sat down to write this essay I got an email from a man in South Carolina. He’d been studying for his U.S. citizenship exam and he’d decided to read my book, These Truths: A History of The United States, ...

Feature

The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

May 9, 2019 • by Alberto Toscano

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...

Europe & Central Asia

Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

Part Three: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

May 8, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

Editor’s note: in two prior essays on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Prof. Wagner discussed the origins of, and the historical and contemporary resistance to, the New Polish School of the History of the Shoah. In this ...

Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

Feature

Confrontation Over the Occupation of the Embassy of Venezuela

On April 10, three US left-wing groups occupied the Embassy of Venezuela in DC

May 8, 2019 • by Jo Freeman

On April 10, three US left-wing groups occupied the Embassy of Venezuela in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. at the invitation of the Maduro government. Calling themselves the Embassy Protection Collective (EPC), CodePink, ANSWER, and Popular Resistance are living at the embassy 24/7 to keep representatives of opposition leader ...

Confrontation Over the Occupation of the Embassy of Venezuela

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National Identities, Popular Histories

Nations are built on both ideals and ugly contradictions – historians have an obligation to both

May 8, 2019 • by Claire Potter

This essay was originally published on May 8 2019. I want to begin with a confession, since it’s always better to admit the embarrassing thing that everybody knows: twentieth century United States historians like me are raised with minimal expectations that become glaringly apparent when we read a book that begins ...

Feature

John Singleton, Anti-Semitism in the New York Times, and TikTok

Past Present Episode 178

May 7, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil discuss the legacy of filmmaker John Singleton, an anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times, and the latest social media sensation, TikTok. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Filmmaker John Singleton has died. Natalia discussed this article by Singleton in the Hollywood Reporter about whether a ...

John Singleton, Anti-Semitism in the New York Times, and TikTok

Feature

Are American Indians Part of a United States National History?

This land didn’t just used to belong to indigenous nations — it still does

May 7, 2019 • by Malinda Maynor Lowery

This essay was originally published on May 8 2019. I assume I was invited to participate because my field of study is American Indian history, and this book does not cover a lot of American Indian history. So my role here is to talk about how we could and should deal ...

Blue Monday

Nancy Pelosi May Be Too Clever for Our Own Good

Why only unambiguous opposition to Trump can save us

May 6, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Last week a New York Times profile of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reported that Pelosi wants the Democrats to “stay in the center,” insisting that for the party to succeed in 2020 it must “own the mainstream.” Pelosi, currently the most powerful Democrat in public office, has surely sought ...