From the Editors Archives - Page 64 of 171

Feature

Becoming the Face of Change

Gerard Campbell reflects on his life journey through poetry

September 23, 2018 • by Gerard Campbell

The building was isolated, far upstate. Its residents lived in small dorm-style rooms whose doors had small windows on them. Each hallway had a staff member on one end and a staff member on the other. Everyone had to be accounted for and in their place; one wrong move and ...

Feature

The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller

Keller is well known for being blind, but deserves to be heralded for her progressive social vision

September 22, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

The Texas Board of Education recently voted to remove Helen Keller from the state’s required social studies curriculum. This is a good excuse to remind people about Keller, who is one of the most iconic public figures of the past century but whose life and legacy is misunderstood. Most people think ...

Feature

The New Political Reality

Trumpism as White Minority Rule

September 21, 2018 • by Sanford Schram

Okay, Trump is not Hitler: that is a less than perfect comparison. And the racists making robocalls are not the Brown Shirts or Storm Troopers of Kristallnacht. Those calls, however, are increasing in frequency, going beyond dog whistling to outright race-baiting, whether it is against African American candidates for Florida’s governor or ...

Feature

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Technology in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis

September 20, 2018 • by Conrad Moriarty-Cole

“Every society creates its own world, internal and external, and of this creation technique is neither an instrument nor a cause; it is a dimension… an everywhere dense sub-set. For it is present at every point at which the society constitutes what is, for it, the real-rational.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the ...

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Feature

I Believe Christine Blasey Ford

Republicans have no plausible argument about why Brett Kavanaugh is innocent

September 19, 2018 • by Claire Potter

What will come of the allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen? As of today, it is not clear that Ford will testify before the Senate ...

Feature

A Kaleidoscopic Novel of Radiant Beauty

The new English Translation of Ondjaki’s Transparent City

September 19, 2018 • by Bongani Kona

To read the full review of Transparent City, visit the Johannesburg Review of Books – a trove of reviews, essays, poetry, photographs and short fiction from South Africa, Africa and beyond. In Cape Town, in the early nineteen-seventies, construction began on what would be known as the Foreshore Freeway Bridge. Designed with the intent ...

Feature

Bagel Capitalism

September 18, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

As we approach Yom Kippur, a day of both fasting and forgiveness, I wish to offer a sermon about food. Specifically, the bagel, which has become both a symbol and symptom of some of the worst aspects of American capitalism. Let me explain. Growing up in Plainfield, N.J. in the 1950s, ...

Feature

Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Past Present Episode 146

September 18, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

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 ...

Crafting, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Marshmallow Test

Feature

Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

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

September 18, 2018 • by Jose Casanova

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 ...

Feature

The Abortion Debate in Argentina

Or how men, priests, and the ignorant subjugate women

September 17, 2018 • by Emmanuel Guerisoli

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 ...

Feature

De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Read the introduction to this volume written by the editors

September 17, 2018 • by Lewis Aron, Sue Grand and Joyce Slochower

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 ...

De-Idealizing Relational Theory: A Critique From Within

Feature

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

September 16, 2018 • by Bruce Cory

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 ...