From the Editors Archives - Page 61 of 171

Blue Monday

Getting Millennials to the Polls

An Extra-Credit Assignment on Voting and Citizenship

October 15, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

As commentators across the political spectrum agree, the upcoming U.S. elections on Election Day, November 6, are very important in determining the future of American democracy. Readers of this column know that the only filter on my political opinions is the filter of language itself. I say what I think. I ...

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Rethinking Charlottesville in Light of Unite the Right II

Shut down the Alt-Right, don’t debate it.

October 15, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

More than a year after Charlottesville, some of the alt-right’s stances -- in one form or another -- have entered into the mainstream conservative platform. As this has happened I have become more and more convinced that debating these extremists is not the solution. In fact, I argued for not ...

Rethinking Charlottesville in Light of Unite the Right II

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Plastics and Fossil Fuels

Follow the History of Technological Systems

October 13, 2018 • by Simon Pirani

Plastics have a history too. David Attenborough’s magnificent Blue Planet II TV series, which last year jolted public anger over plastic waste in the oceans, focused attention on a bunch of materials that hardly existed a century ago. Output of plastics has mushroomed since the mid twentieth century, on the back ...

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The Persons Among People in 1787

Why the U.S. Constitution contained within itself a promise that became a lie

October 12, 2018 • by Julie J. Miller

In the spring of 1787, a group of men met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to revise the Articles of Confederation and ended up drafting the United States Constitution. That convention dissolved itself about four months later, on September 17, when work, some said, was finished, and the paper signed at that ...

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The Majority Finds Its School

The lessons of Gerda Lerner

October 11, 2018 • by Julia Foulkes

In the fall of 1962, Gerda Lerner offered a pioneering course in women’s history at the New School, titled “Great Women in American History.” Such a course may have occurred at Radcliffe College in the 1930s, and perhaps at other women’s colleges, but Lerner’s course at the New School was ...

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Kavanaugh Protests Continue to the End

‘Sexual Predators on the Court, Hell no, We Don’t Support’

October 10, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

Protests against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to become a Justice of the Supreme Court resumed on Thursday, October 4, and continued through Saturday, October 6 when he was officially sworn in. While the protesters were still mostly women, more younger women came than in September, dropping the average age of the protesters ...

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Exiled Knowledge Salvaged for World Use

The histories hidden in the New School’s digital archives

October 10, 2018 • by Mark Larrimore

The histories of an iconoclastic institution aren’t easy to trace. The New School has always been diffuse, porous and underfunded. Until recently, The New School didn’t even have an archive. So the fifty-seven volumes of publicity scrapbooks maintained by a clipping service for the school’s first several decades -- and ...

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One Year after Las Vegas

Where does the gun control debate stand?

October 9, 2018 • by Christopher Howard-Woods

Within a period of about ten minutes, 64-year old Stephen Paddock, positioned from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, fired 1,100 rounds of ammunition into an open crowd one year ago last week. The deadliest of its kind to date, the incident took the lives ...

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Space Race Remixed

The mythical war between capitalisms

October 9, 2018 • by Sarah Murphy

For centuries we have tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe and images have been vital to that unravelling. At different points in history the moon has been held responsible for insanity, fertility, and even home to alien life. But mostly, these celestial bodies have remained a mere twinkling in ...

Blue Monday

Courts, Kavanaugh, and Constitutional Hardball

October 8, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

On November 22, 1895 Eugene V. Debs stepped outside of the Woodstock Jail in Chicago, where he had been imprisoned for six months. Debs, the President of the American Railway Union, had been one of the leaders of the Pullman Strike of 1894, considered by many to be the first ...

Courts, Kavanaugh, and Constitutional Hardball

Democracy

The Legitimacy of the Supreme Court?

The system is working and that is the problem

October 8, 2018 • by Ajay Singh Chaudhary

We Americans are “constitutional fetishists” in the apt phrase of the lesser-known mid-20th century critical theorist of law and economy, Franz Neumann. We tend to think that a particular order of state institutions -- for example, our current incarnation of the separation-of-powers -- embodies the essence of democracy instead of looking ...

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“1933,” or What Hitler’s Ascendency Teaches Us About Authoritarianism

10 Historic Lessons for the Age of Trump

October 8, 2018 • by Jürgen von Mahs

2018 marks the 85th anniversary of the birth of the perhaps the most strident authoritarian regime in Western history: Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power makes this year a good occasion to reflect on the lessons that can be learned from the fateful series of events that unfolded in Germany ...