New School Histories Vertical

Announcing a new vertical for Public Seminar

Editors: Mark Larrimore and Julia Foulkes A school for the present. In 1918, the New Republic-based creators of what would become the New School for Social Research* called for a re-thinking of what higher education could be. Universities were hamstrung by backward-looking legacies and structures, both institutional and intellectual. Education needed to ...
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New School Histories Vertical

Music by the Numbers

An interview with Eli Maor

That music and mathematics are somehow related has been known for centuries. Pythagoras, around the 5th century BCE, may have been the first to discover a quantitative relation between the two: experimenting with taut strings, he found out that shortening the effective length of a string to one half its ...
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Music by the Numbers

Democracy and the Uterus

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Bodily Autonomy

I was born out of a policy that forbade women to have control over their bodies until they raised 4 children. Under communist Romania, starting in 1967 and until 1989, many babies were born because women were refused control over their sexuality and abortion was made illegal. Most women wanted ...
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Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

A review of Steven Zipperstein’s new book

Steven Zipperstein’s new book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, is uncannily timely: today in particular we might appreciate the irony of fate that American anti-racism can trace one line of origin to a backwoods region of the Russian Empire. This region, Bessarabia, is among those parts of Eastern Europe ...
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Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

A Letter to President Trump

 On this July 4 I am in Poland, where President Andrzej Duda has just decapitated the judiciary, and Poles are, as I write, in the streets to protest the continuing theft of their democracy. Perhaps because of this, a stirring performance of Krzysztof Penderecki's "Polish Requiem" I attended at St. Mary's Cathedral ...
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We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

Sabotage as Environmental Activism

Why sabotage of pipelines is a justifiable and effective form of resistance to capitalism and climate change

--Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value” (1970) On July 23, 2017, two members of the Catholic Worker Movement, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya claimed responsibility for sabotaging construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Iowa and parts of South Dakota. They had burned several pieces of heavy machinery ...
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Sabotage as Environmental Activism

Civility, Gays and Gyms, and Mr. Rogers

Past Present Episode 137

In this episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil debate recent claims that the Left is destroying civility in politics, the LGBTQ+ history of American gym culture, and a half-century of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: When White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to ...
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Civility, Gays and Gyms, and Mr. Rogers

Separation Is Never Ending: Attachment Is a Human Right

Why 40 researchers say attachment is a basic right and separation a clear wrong

For over 75 years, psychologists and psychiatrists have known that abrupt and/or prolonged separation can have major implications, including depression, anxiety, and behavioral disturbances. In 1952, Bowlby & Robertson argued, “There is now evidence that prolonged periods of maternal deprivation in very young children can, in some cases, give rise to extremely ...
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Separation Is Never Ending: Attachment Is a Human Right