From the Editors Archives - Page 48 of 170

Feature

Good for Grassroots, Bad for Business

How long can the business community in the United States tolerate Donald Trump as president?

January 13, 2019 • by John Lawrence

Back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration embraced a so-called “royalty holiday” for oil companies that developed leases in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was pretty simple: rather than impose royalties of 12 1/2% to 16 2/3% for developing publicly-owned resources (already paltry by international ...

Feature

A Geopolitical Catastrophe for Ukraine: 1918

Experimenting with counterfactual history allows us to reconsider simple questions and search for more precise answers

January 12, 2019 • by Yaroslav Hrytsak

What could have happened had a local war for Lviv not drawn forces away from the Ukrainian revolution in 1918? Experimenting with counterfactual history allows us to reconsider simple questions and search for more precise answers. When we recall 1918, within the context of Polish-Ukrainian relations, the first thing that springs ...

A Geopolitical Catastrophe for Ukraine: 1918

Feature

Budget Watch

If New York’s economy slows, reality-based budgeting must prevail

January 11, 2019 • by James Parrott

Two years ago, the outlook for New Yorkers was bleak on the political side but brighter on the economic front. Today, the trends appear to have reversed. The midterm election results portend more hopeful changes in Albany and, the effects of the partial federal government shutdown notwithstanding, Washington. On the ...

Feature

Why We Need to Listen to Rashida Tlaib

Defending liberal democracy from Trumpism is not a distraction for the Left

January 10, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Last week saw the swearing in of the new, Democratic-controlled Congress, the fruit of the “blue wave” that swept across the country last November. The 116th Congress has been rightly hailed as “historic” for its demographic diversity. The country’s first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was re-elected, and ...

Feature

How Being Labeled with ADHD Made Me a Meth Addict

The self-fulfilling prophecy of a diagnostic label

January 10, 2019 • by Maggie Mosbarger

I woke up in a plastic bed to a nurse with a thick Russian accent asking me to sit upright so that she could draw my blood. It was a peculiar way to start my first full day in the Fairfax Behavioral Health facility. The night before, I had been ...

How Being Labeled with ADHD Made Me a Meth Addict

Feature

President as Prisoner

Trump has walled himself into a losing position

January 9, 2019 • by Sanford Schram

Back in 1989 Bill Grover published a great book, The President as Prisoner. In that book, Grover argued that, regardless of who occupied the position of President, that person was likely to be seriously constrained by political pressures and institutional constraints. Politically, the president is constrained by powerful interest groups, especially ...

Feature

The New History of Capitalism

And what it owes to poststructuralism

January 9, 2019 • by Andrew Seal

Where did the new history of capitalism come from? I would like to break from the common sense narrative and argue that the new history of capitalism should not be understood as rooted in or as a response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Certainly the crisis drew attention to the field ...

Feature

“Fault Lines,” Dry January, and the Sex Recession

Past Present Episode 161

January 8, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia welcome Princeton historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian Zelizer to discuss their new book, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, followed by a discussion of “Dry January,” and new findings that young people are having less sex. Here are some links ...

“Fault Lines,” Dry January, and the Sex Recession

Feature

The Biggest Dog You’ve Ever Seen

Interview with National Book Award Winner Sigrid Nunez

January 8, 2019 • by Sigrid Nunez and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In November 2018, the prestigious National Book Award for fiction went to The Friend, a novel about grief, writing, friendship, and a Great Dane named Apollo. The author of The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018) is Sigrid Nunez, a long-time faculty member of the New School Creative Writing Program. Nunez has published seven other books, ...

Blue Monday

On Calls to Impeach the Motherfucker

The Democratic Party needs a “dialectic” between the words of Tlaib and the words of Pelosi

January 7, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

“We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.” Thus declared Rashida Tlaib last Thursday night while speaking at a MoveOn event just hours after being sworn in as a new Congresswoman. A shitstorm of controversy ensued. Across the political spectrum Tlaib was denounced for her “vulgarity.” The New York Times headline reporting on her statement neatly summed up the response of ...

Feature

Crossing Borders Is My Life

Doing and teaching literary translation in the age of customs and border protection

January 7, 2019 • by Val Vinokur

I grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in a country afraid its citizens would leave and wary of foreigners somehow contaminating or stealing something from the homeland. As we were preparing to leave Moscow forever (we thought) in 1978, my grandmother's youngest brother, whom she had ...

Feature

The Weekly Standard, Sheryl Sandberg, and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”

Past Present Episode 160

January 6, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil discuss the closing of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, changing public perceptions of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and the controversy over the 1944 Christmas classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: After twenty-three years, the ...