The Performance of Transgender Inclusion

The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary

The first time someone asked me my pronoun was about a decade ago at a meeting of directors of LGBTQ centers from colleges and universities in the Northeast. Sitting around a table for our first session, we were invited to share our names, pronouns, and the school we represented. I ...
Read More

Cindy Hyde-Smith, or Mississippi God Damn!

Why the history of white supremacy matters for the last Senate election of 2018

On Tuesday November 27 -- tomorrow -- voters in Mississippi will go to the polls to choose their next U.S. Senator in a runoff election pitting incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, a far-right Republican and Trump supporter, against Mike Espy, a moderate Democrat who served as Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton ...
Read More
Cindy Hyde-Smith, or Mississippi God Damn!

Celebrating Human Rights

The 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Human rights are under attack – not just in the U.S. but worldwide. We see rights violations as white supremacists attack synagogues and send bombs to people whose political positions they wish to silence. We see them as the government continues to separate children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. We see them in racially-provoked police-public ...
Read More
Celebrating Human Rights

A Citizen’s First Vote

Surviving the Georgia voter purge, a first generation American casts her first vote — with a little help from her friends

Luckily for me, many of my peers agreed. With each passing tragedy and movement, from the #BlackLivesMatter movement to Never Again MSD, many young Americans have realized that our political system must change. If our generation did not care, we were not sure if any other would. With adversity came ...
Read More

Fixing Something Starts With Seeing How It’s Broken

Mindy Fullilove Talks About 400 Years Of Inequality

Victoria Richards: Is there a specific event or defining moment that inspired ‘400 Years of Inequality?’ Mindy Fullilove: The New School has helped us launch this project, which you can find on our website. 2019 will mark the 400th anniversary since the first Africans arrived in Jamestown [as slaves]. The project is ...
Read More

Chief Justice Roberts to the Rescue?

Or, how the relationships between conservative idealism and realism may serve the public good

I wrote this last week, but almost as soon as I did, I had second thoughts. I read an early draft of Peter Dreier comprehensive, “What Should American Progressives Learn From the Mid-terms?” in which he thoroughly demonstrated the depth and breadth of the Democrats’ victory in the elections. Perhaps given the dimensions of ...
Read More

Life and Debt under Capitalism

An excerpt from Elettra Stimilli’s The Debt of Living

From the beginning, capitalism has established an intimate connection with individual lives, formerly based on the exploitation of specific skills in the form of work. The real change is that today at stake are not only specific services, but the whole of life and the very capacity of human living ...
Read More
Life and Debt under Capitalism

Smart Media Is a Pain

As machine intelligence advances, we encounter the painful limits of our social intelligence

Public media discourse has been fairly agonizing. All sides seem beset by mobs of malicious morons: waves of fake news pounding against their believers, crafty hackers seeding chains of disinformation, the trollish alt-right cooptation of identity politics, and even a populous turnout at the US midterm elections that, no matter your political leanings, likely ...
Read More

Making America Good Again

A few notes of thanks as Purple Wednesday closes a two-year run

As I wrote that day, The message of The Poseidon Adventure was that we must not give in to despair, even in our darkest hour. In order to save our own lives, we must come to terms with, and fight back against, the new reality. The challenges faced by those on The Poseidon are ...
Read More

What Should American Progressives Learn from the Midterms?

Victories in Congress and at the state and local level could pave the way for a progressive groundswell in 2020

Politics is a struggle for power -- over ideas and interests -- and after this year’s midterm elections two things remain clear. First, voter suppression and intimidation, racism, and corporate money continue to infect American politics like a virus. Second, despite those obstacles, America is a much more progressive country ...
Read More
What Should American Progressives Learn from the Midterms?

Engaging, and Accompanying, the Pain of Others

An excerpt from Robert Grossmark’s The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst

Robert Grossmark's The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst introduces a new psychoanalytic register for working with such patients and states, involving a present and engaged analyst who is unobtrusive to the unfolding of the patient’s inner world and the flow of mutual enactments. For the unobtrusive relational analyst, the world and idiom of ...
Read More

When Psychoanalysis Needs to Adapt to the Patient

An Interview with Robert Grossmark

Psychoanalysts increasingly find themselves working with patients who seem to defy verbal and dialogic engagement. Such patients are challenging for a psychoanalytic approach that assumes that the patient relates in the verbal realm and is capable of reflective functioning. Both the classical stance of neutrality and abstinence and a contemporary ...
Read More
When Psychoanalysis Needs to Adapt to the Patient