From the Editors Archives - Page 53 of 172

Blue Monday

John Kelly Is a Present Danger to the Republic

With all due respect

December 10, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

The White House has finally announced that Chief of Staff John Kelly will be stepping down by the end of the year. Kelly has arguably been fairly feckless in his discharge of his White House duties. But he has nonetheless often been regarded by pundits as “an adult in the ...

John Kelly Is a Present Danger to the Republic

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Older Workers at Risk in Next Recession

November 2018 Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

December 10, 2018 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today reported an unemployment rate of 2.9% for November, an increase of 0.1 percentage points from October. Older workers are benefiting from a historically low unemployment rate. Now is the time to prepare for older workers' higher risks in recessions. Older workers least prepared for retirement are most likely ...

Education

Making Family Child Care Work For 3K

New York City is wise to invest in early education

December 9, 2018 • by Kendra Hurley

Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned for re-election in 2017 on a promise of instituting “3K-for-All” -- a logical extension of the popular citywide launch of universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) for 4-year-olds during his first term. At the time, neither he nor the voters may have envisioned parents dropping their 3-year-olds off ...

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“Bread in those days was like gold!”

A survivor’s account of the Siege of Leningrad

December 8, 2018 • by Mikael Kai Zakharov

The Blockade of Leningrad is a particularly dark period in modern history. Almost anyone who has family ties in the city will know someone directly affected by it. My great uncle was among those who survived the blockade – aged only six when it began. Hearing his account of events ...

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The Perils and Promise of Collective Memory

Reflections on Imagination and Forgetting

December 7, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“We should remember with caution, even as we must proceed boldly.” This is the way I have already tried to succinctly summarize my approach to “gray memory” earlier this year. I know that memory holds great promise, as Milan Kundera once put it: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of ...

The Perils and Promise of Collective Memory

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Roland Barthes Reports from the Sanatorium

A new collection examines how institutions infantilize society

December 7, 2018 • by Roland Barthes and Jody Gladding

Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts, recently published by Columbia University Press, provides an unparalleled look into Roland Barthes' life of letters. It presents a selection of correspondence, from his adolescence in the 1930s through the height of his career and up to the last years of his life, covering such topics as ...

Roland Barthes Reports from the Sanatorium

Education

Student Workers Ratify A Strong Contract

Worker organizing holds The New School to its foundational values

December 6, 2018 • by Angela Butel

After more than fourteen months and 64 bargaining sessions, Student Employees at The New School -- United Automobile Workers (SENS-UAW), the union for academic student workers, has voted to ratify a contract with the New School administration. This hard-won agreement will provide substantial economic increases and important workplace protections and ...

Student Workers Ratify A Strong Contract

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What is Psychoanalysis?

An excerpt from Robert Boyers, The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals

December 6, 2018 • by Robert Boyers

In The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, Robert Boyers reflects on his allegiances and disputes with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers explores the process by which they fall in and out of fashion. Through encounters with authority, ...

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Racism, Thomas Farr, and the Legacies of George H. W. Bush

Bush was no Trump, but he helped pave the way for Trump

December 5, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Late last week Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina declared that he will vote against President Trump’s nomination of Thomas Farr to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals, effectively killing the nomination in the Senate. Scott is the first African-American from South Carolina to ever serve in the ...

Racism, Thomas Farr, and the Legacies of George H. W. Bush

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The New School’s Paradoxical Archive

How a school focused on the future has learned to love its past

December 5, 2018 • by Wendy Scheir

If an archives is perceived to be a site of retrograde nostalgia whose purpose is to revive conservative, old ideas, then a shadow of suspicion is cast over a university archives, too. The very idea of an archives does not align, even outwardly conflicts, with The New School’s idea of itself. It’s not ...

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The Unfolding Welfare Crisis in the UK

Will a system designed for universal care become a universal catastrophe?

December 4, 2018 • by Christian Garland

Chris Gold of Shepton Beauchamp, Somerset -- one of the “test” areas in which Universal Credit is in operation -- was found to have died of natural causes. Despite suffering a stroke in 2015, Gold had lost his Employment Support Allowance after being declared “fit for work,” and then in ...

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We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds

A response to Jen Manion

December 3, 2018 • by Dean Spade

Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, "The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary," proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm ...