From the Editors Archives - Page 34 of 170

Blue Monday

On Trump’s Dangerous Words

Why We Need to Use the Word “Impeachment” Now

April 29, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

We humans are many things. One is that we are beings who understand, construct, and change our world in and through language. In the beginning there were words. The late great writer and dissident-citizen-president, Vaclav Havel, said it well in his powerful 1989 acceptance speech to the German Booksellers Association, “Words ...

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Shout-out over Armenian Genocide on 104th Anniversary

Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is a national holiday in Armenia

April 29, 2019 • by Jo Freeman

Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman empire exterminated 1.5 million Armenians. The starting date is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915. Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is a national holiday in Armenia. On that day the Armenian Embassy in Washington, D.C. holds an annual memorial. This year’s was marked by a shouting ...

Shout-out over Armenian Genocide on 104th Anniversary

Education

Centering Human Relations in Learning

Human Relations Center at the New School: a place for women to come learn and to socialize

April 29, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes

In Spring 1973, the author and women’s rights leader Betty Friedan taught a course on “Women in New York” at The New School. The eight sessions focused on the problems females faced in the city, in work and beyond, and it drew a large crowd. Enrollment consisted of 97 women ...

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Looking Through the Lens of Weegee: An Interview with Christopher Bonanos

The NBCC biography award winner on Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous

April 28, 2019 • by Liz Sheldon

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Liz ...

Looking Through the Lens of Weegee: An Interview with Christopher Bonanos

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Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

The President Plays with Fire, and The Rest of Us Get Burned

April 28, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

My mind was reeling. I was writing a column about Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association in Indianapolis when I learned of yesterday’s (Saturday) synagogue shooting in California by a white supremacist. The connection between these two events was immediate and obvious to me, as I will briefly explain in ...

Trump and the San Diego Synagogue Shooting

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A Reverence for Stories: Interview with Tommy Orange

The NBCC John Leonard Prize winner on There There

April 27, 2019 • by Alex Vara

In March, The New School hosted this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, which honor literature published in the United States in the previous year. The awards are presented in six categories -- autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- and are the only U.S. literary awards chosen by critics themselves. Alex ...

A Reverence for Stories: Interview with Tommy Orange

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Richard Rorty: The Dark Years

The philosopher’s vision of what is dangerous and yet possible

April 26, 2019 • by Richard J. Bernstein

The passages below are selections from “Richard Rorty: The Dark Years.” Introduction No one was more acute than American philosopher Richard Rorty in echoing and epitomizing the accusations and taunts of his critics. In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” he tells us that conservative culture warriors characterize him “one of the relativistic, ...

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Braids: a Memoir

The lessons I missed out on as a mixed kid living in a mostly white town in Central Florida

April 25, 2019 • by Jasmine Respess

I never really learned to braid. I can do a simple three strand braid, but nothing more. This is one of the lessons I missed out on as a mixed kid living in a predominantly white town. Growing up, I spent most of my time outside. By the swamp, in the ...

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Further Thoughts on Impeachment as Political Strategy

Do it to expose and weaken Trump and the Republicans for 2020

April 25, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The argument about impeachment continues, as it should. Yesterday I laid out the general case for impeachment. My argument was not ethical or legal, it was political: impeachment is a legitimate constitutional process that ought to be pursued not because it will remove Trump from office -- Senate Republicans will surely ...

Further Thoughts on Impeachment as Political Strategy

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Why Leonardo Da Vinci Matters Beyond a $450 Million Painting

500 years after his death he can still teach us to create what doesn’t exist yet

April 25, 2019 • by Francesca Fiorani

This celebrity treatment of Leonardo da Vinci misses why his work really matters. Whether or not the most recent discoveries survive the test of time (some attributions have been short-lived, as scholars’ opinions about authorship evolved), they are scheduled to be included in several major exhibitions in museums around the ...

Why Leonardo Da Vinci Matters Beyond a $450 Million Painting

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How Game of Thrones Will End

Spoilers from the fifteenth century

April 24, 2019 • by Jeffrey R. Wilson

I’m not a particularly vigorous fan of Game of Thrones, the kind who dissects all things Westeros on Internet forums. I haven’t seen any secret scripts or decoded some hidden message from the books. But I’m a scholar of Renaissance literature who’s taught a class on how the series takes its storyline ...

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For the Green New Deal / Against Ideology

Ideology looms as a threat to human decency, justice and survival

April 24, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Ideology doesn’t only undermine democracy, as I tried to demonstrate in my last post. It looms as a threat to human decency, justice and survival. I thought about this reading Jake Davis’s “Why I Want Nothing to do with the Green New Deal. Davis’s essay attracted a great deal of attention, with ...