From the Editors Archives - Page 51 of 171

Feature

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 ...

Feature

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 ...

Feature

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 ...

Feature

“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 ...

Feature

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 ...

Feature

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

Feature

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. ...

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

Education

Uncovering the Musical Divide

The tale of two cultures at the Mannes School of Music and The New School

December 14, 2018 • by Sally Bick

When Julia Foulkes, a historian at The New School, asked me to write about the historical cultures that defined the Mannes School of Music and those of the New School, I couldn’t help but think about my own musical pedigree: once a performer, now music scholar. This disciplinary divide is ...

Feature

The Dedication of the Safran Reading Room

Reflections on a legacy

December 13, 2018 • by Howard Steele

The follow post is Howard Steele's opening remarks for the dedication ceremony of the Safran Reading Room on December 5th, 2018. Click here to read Ali Shames-Dawson's comments on the dedication. Good evening, everyone, my name is Howard Steele. I am a professor here and the chair for the clinical psychology ...

The Dedication of the Safran Reading Room

Feature

JFK’s Queer White House

What we can learn about a straight President by looking at the gay men in his orbit

December 13, 2018 • by Claire Potter

President John F. Kennedy has become infamous for his vivid, and some might say almost compulsive, heterosexual affairs. But straight men can have a gay side, and JFK’s life was filled with prominent gay men, friendships which open the door to other histories. At least one of these intimates, Kirk ...