From the Editors Archives - Page 50 of 170

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Should “Child’s Play” Include a Little Danger?

The Progressive-era roots of the ‘adventure playground’ movement

December 24, 2018 • by Randi Storch and Kevin Sheets

Adventure playgrounds are built on the idea that kids need to play in danger-possible environments, free from rigid schedules and restrictions of modern parenting. These playscapes throw kids into industrial-like settings where hammers, saws, and drain pipes replace the see saw, slide, and swing structures of the post-World War II ...

Should “Child’s Play” Include a Little Danger?

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Interview and Excerpt: Robert Coover’s New Book, The Enchanted Prince

An innovative author continues to test the limits of genre

December 24, 2018 • by Robert Coover and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

Robert Coover, author of innovative fiction such as Pricksongs & Descants, The Public Burning, and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut, has had a long and influential career in avant-garde literature. His latest book, The Enchanted Prince (Foxrock Books/The Evergreen Review, 2018), continues to expand the genre. In 62 pages of mischievous parody, flamboyant image-making, ...

Interview and Excerpt: Robert Coover’s New Book, The Enchanted Prince

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Tiny Animals

Season one of ‘My Brilliant Friend’

December 23, 2018 • by Marissa Brostoff

I think they are cockroaches, streaming out of the sewer by the thousands, but they might be rats -- we see them from a distance, and because it is dark and there are no people in the shot, just the empty street and the dirty white cement of the housing ...

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Antisemitism after Pittsburgh

Wayne Koestenbaum’s Poetic Ethics

December 22, 2018 • by David Micah Greenberg

About a month after the murder of eleven at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh -- the worst attack on Jews in the history of this country -- we might pause to reflect on the nature of the continuing threat. The attack itself has only elevated anxiety that Jews ...

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My Arrest in Poland

Reflections on the significance of an apparently trivial event

December 21, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“At the time the circumstances of my arrest in Poland seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of how things were then and what ...

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The Moral Reader and the Moral Life

Exploring Timothy Aubry’s essay, ‘Should studying literature be fun?’

December 20, 2018 • by Andrew Seal

Earlier this month, English professor Timothy Aubry published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review with the rather querulous title “Should Studying Literature Be Fun?” The essay was a kind of précis (as far as I can tell) of his new book Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures. I have not been able to read the ...

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“Well Known as Miss Betty Cooper”

Gender Expression in 18th-Century Boston

December 20, 2018 • by Caitlin G.D. Hopkins

In the years before the American Revolution, Boston newspapers routinely advertised the sale and recapture of enslaved people alongside news of Massachusetts’ resistance to British rule. In these ads, enslavers provided descriptions of fugitives in order to assist slave catchers in returning them to bondage. One 1771 advertisement sought the recapture ...

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1968 in the Time of the Plague

The morphing meaning of a remarkable year

December 19, 2018 • by Jeremy Varon

As a scholar of the 1960s, I had looked forward for several years to 2018 with both excitement and misgivings. 2018 would be, at last, the Big One: the 50th anniversary of 1968, widely anointed the most remarkable year in a remarkable era. The limelight beckoned for the spirited sub-field of ...

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Confronting the U.S. Census as a Weapon of White Supremacy

The race question has been crucial to civil rights, but it also perpetuates racism

December 17, 2018 • by Karen Gaffney

On March 26, 2018, the Trump administration announced that it would add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Since then, many serious objections have been raised, highlighted through multiple lawsuits. Some are concerned that such a question will cause an undercount, others that it will result in further marginalization of immigrants, less ...

Confronting the U.S. Census as a Weapon of White Supremacy

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New York City Buildings Were My Education

How campus architecture shaped an academic life

December 14, 2018 • by A. W. Strouse

On my way to teach each morning at The New School, I always say a prayer to my two spirit animals: a gargoyle and a steam pipe. Fraternal twins, they adorn a building on the corner of 14th Street and University Place, guarding Union Square. The gargoyle -- like a ...

Education

UNC-Chapel Hill Proposes to Raise Millions to Preserve Silent Sam

This doesn’t solve the problem: and the money could go to pay grad students a living wage

December 14, 2018 • by Meli Kimathi

On the night of December 8, after proctoring the final exam for the undergraduate course I teach, I got the phone call that I simultaneously needed and dreaded. “What are your thoughts on participation?” my co-instructor asked. “I have so many overlapping concerns that I don’t know where to begin!” I exclaimed. ...