From the Editors Archives - Page 36 of 172

Feature

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

Feature

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 ...

Feature

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 ...

For the Green New Deal / Against Ideology

Activism

How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

Part Two: Confronting Polish Responsibility for the Shoah in Paris

April 24, 2019 • by Izabela Wagner

Editor’s note: in the first part of her essay on the challenges Polish scholars are confronting in their efforts to bring attention to Polish-responsibility for portions of the Shoah, Wagner discussed origins of – and the rise of resistance to – the New Polish School of the History of Shoah. In this ...

How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance

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Notre Dame Cathedral, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the Center for American Progress

Past Present Episode 176

April 23, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss the fire at Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral, President Trump’s attacks against Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the history of liberal think tanks. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The world watched as Paris’ iconic Notre Dame Cathedral was engulfed ...

Notre Dame Cathedral, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the Center for American Progress

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Mass Psychology of Crisis

For a structural analysis of financialization and against the use of “fascism” as a scare tactic

April 23, 2019 • by Nancy Fraser

Mass psychology, new fascism, financialization. The conjunction of these three terms is startling. Its meaning is not immediately transparent. To grasp it requires an imaginative leap. What connects them, for me, is a fourth term, crisis. Not just financial crisis, nor indeed any crisis that is merely sectoral -- whether ecological, economic, social or ...

Blue Monday

Two Cheers for Impeachment

The political “risks” are not that great, and they are worth taking

April 22, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

In an ideal world, the thought of impeaching Donald Trump would warrant at least three cheers, along with some somersaults and a marching band (my preference would be for a New Orleans Second Line led by Trombone Shorty). Yet in an ideal world Donald Trump would be nothing but a ...

Education

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

Towards a Genuine Collaboration

April 22, 2019 • by Ann Larson

What if the president of the United States, along with Congress, cancelled student debt and made public college tuition free? Just a few years ago, these goals would have seemed like the pie-in-the sky dreams of a marginal sect. Today, free public college is supported by major presidential candidates, including ...

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

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Reading the Mueller Report

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime you just might find — you know how to read.

April 21, 2019 • by Claire Potter

I understand why you wouldn’t want to read the whole thing through: it’s really long, repetitive and dull. But most of all, you will want to react before reading because you just wanted the Trump presidency to be over, right? You wanted Robert Mueller to make the case for why ...

Feature

I’m an Orthodox rabbi who is going to start officiating LGBTQ weddings. Here’s why.

If we don’t, we risk further alienation and falling into an abyss of religious irrelevance by denying these couples their rightful place of belonging.

April 20, 2019 • by Avram Mlotek

A queer friend of mine from a haredi Orthodox background had posed a query publicly on social media. She had attended a conference on LGBTQ inclusion. There she learned a practice of certain Catholic priests who described going into gay bars in full clerical garb: They would sit in the ...

I’m an Orthodox rabbi who is going to start officiating LGBTQ weddings. Here’s why.

Feature

New Fascism, Mass Psychology & Financialization: Part 3

Psychoanalytic resources for (anti-) fascist mobilization

April 19, 2019 • by Lucas Ballestín

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koK79g4O-qQ&feature=youtu.be Organized by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (University College London) and Chiara Bottici (New School) What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s 'new fascisms' through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brought together scholars from across disciplines to ...