Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Past Present Episode 146

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss the new reality show Making It, the 2008 financial collapse ten years later, and the death of Walter Mischel, the social psychologist who created the “marshmallow test.” Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Making It, a crafting competition show hosted ...
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Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

Critical Reflections in Lights of Peter Berger’s The Many Altars of Modernity

Given its association with the New School for Social Research, Public Seminar seems to me a fitting space for some critical reflections triggered by former NSSR faculty member Peter Berger’s last major work, The Many Altars of Modernity.[1] The book is significant in a dual sense. It recaptures the style and restates some ...
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Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

The Abortion Debate in Argentina

Or how men, priests, and the ignorant subjugate women

In the very early hours of August 9, the Argentinean Senate missed a historic opportunity to become the first Catholic-majoritarian country in the global south to legalize voluntary abortion. Instead, the upper chamber’s total rejection of abortion revealed three dynamics that prevent women from acquiring full citizenship rights, and which ...
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The Abortion Debate in Argentina

De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Read the introduction to this volume written by the editors

Self-examination and self-critique are the conduits to growth for psychoanalytic patients. Yet within the field, psychoanalysts haven’t sufficiently utilized their own methodology, or subjected their own preferred approaches, to systematic and critical self-examination. Across theoretical divides, psychoanalytic writers and clinicians have too often responded to criticism with defensiveness rather than ...
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De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Can a Right to Counsel Slow Down the ‘Eviction Machine?’

New York City’s push to help working class families from eviction in Housing Court

Earlier this year, The New York Times gave readers a revealing look at the workings of what it labeled “the eviction machine”: The city’s Housing Court. A series of articles detailed how a court system designed to protect tenants has been hijacked by landlords using eviction, or threatened eviction, often based on ...
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Can a Right to Counsel Slow Down the ‘Eviction Machine?’

Rise for the Climate

Shouting marchers took to lower Manhattan on 9/6 to protest Climate Change

Roughly a thousand people marched in lower Manhattan on Thursday, September 6 demanding that the world pay attention to climate change. This was the earliest in a series of climate marches around the globe to draw attention to a summit in San Francisco the following week. When people gathered in Battery ...
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Rise for the Climate

The Powerlessness of the Powerful

Living in post – truth, seeking alternatives, examining Nicolae Ceausescu and Donald Trump

This was most dramatically revealed in the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu on December 21, 1989. As this video documents. A mass rally in support of the leader morphed into a demonstration against the regime, apparently in a flash, though this was not as spontaneous as it appeared at first. In private, ...
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The Illusion of Non-Capitalist Spaces

Capitalism requires zones that appear to be withdrawn from the circuitry of capital so that workers can cultivate their bodies and minds

Why hasn’t capital swallowed up the entire world yet? If we accept the machinic, all-encompassing vision of Capital, why hasn’t the Earth’s surface been totally blanketed by it? Why hasn’t everything been chewed up, guzzled down, and spit out again by capital? One of the first things to strike the ...
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The Illusion of Non-Capitalist Spaces

Heroes but Not Saints

How should we judge reformers and radicals who were also racists?

In 2020, America will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Feminists and others are starting to plan the celebrations, which will include conferences, books, postage stamps, and new monuments honoring the women who fought and won that major battle. In anticipation, New York ...
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Heroes but Not Saints

Jews and Poles

Together for 800 Years But Not Together

Why is this? – Alienation rather than hatred. – A time when Jews were virtually the only intellectuals in Poland. – Why assimilation was impossible. – The modern Jew and the modern Pole. Several weeks ago, Stanisław Mikołajczyk – Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile – stated that there were still ...
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Jews and Poles

Judge Kavanaugh’s Cynical Appeal to Precedent

Why resisting Kavanaugh’s appointment is crucial for the future of SCOTUS

Our hearings in the Senate prove that Brett Kavanaugh has a prodigious memory. Is that why precedent is such an important category for him? Precedent is a special type of memory. For this Judge to call forward precedent as he does, however, is dangerously misleading. Those who decide the future of the Supreme Court ...
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Judge Kavanaugh’s Cynical Appeal to Precedent

Some Thoughts About a Looming Hurricane and the Catastrophe in the White House

The disaster relief we really need

Hurricane Florence approaches the eastern seaboard of the United States. Significant parts of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia have been under mandatory evacuation. And millions of citizens brace for the coming storm, with its storm surges and destructive winds, and its possible tornadoes, and the deluges of rain and ...
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Some Thoughts About a Looming Hurricane and the Catastrophe in the White House