From the Editors Archives - Page 92 of 170

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Civility and Subversion in Dark Times

Answering the Question: Why Public Seminar?

April 6, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Why Public Seminar? Over the past four years, the doubtful, curious, intrigued and impressed have asked me this question, people at my university and at others, academics and non-academics, young and old, New Yorkers, Americans and colleagues from abroad, interested readers and potential contributors. I have answered in various ways, all ...

Feature

No Offense to Robert Musil, But…

The continuing relevance of monuments

April 6, 2018 • by Samantha Oliver

In a 1927 essay, acclaimed Austrian philosopher Robert Musil famously declared, “The remarkable thing about monuments is that one does not notice them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” Musil believed that monuments recede into the background as the public becomes more familiar with them ...

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Russia’s Choice

Voting in predetermined elections

April 5, 2018 • by Ivan Makeyenko

On March 18, Russian citizens faced a painfully familiar dilemma — to vote or not to vote. What on the surface may look like a simple choice between exercising an inalienable right and sinking into political apathy is, in fact, much more delicate and nuanced. For many of us election ...

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The Challenge of the Catalan Independence Movement in Spain

An interview with Enric Juliana

April 5, 2018 • by Gerardo Muñoz

In recent years, Catalan politics has experienced the rise of a pro-independence political alliance across the ideological spectrum. Several factors have contributed to this development: a general social discomfort with the economic crisis of 2008, numerous corruption cases of top governmental officials at both national and regional levels, the failure of ...

The Challenge of the Catalan Independence Movement in Spain

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What Happened at the Lorraine Motel

America’s divisive politics did not begin with the last election

April 4, 2018 • by Claire Potter

When we think about our divided country, social media seems to be a prime culprit: my column last week addressed the ongoing revelations about Facebook, and the use of social media data to micro-target divisive messages to the American electorate during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Experts and ordinary voters are still ...

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Stormy Daniels

Past Present Bonus Episode 5

April 4, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this week's episode, Niki and Natalia debate the Stormy Daniels scandal.

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Feature

Were We There to Talk about AIDS, or Not?

One woman’s journey in psychotherapy

April 4, 2018 • by Margaret Kim Peterson

This excerpt is part of a longer essay. To read the full essay please click here. Introduction. In January of 1990 I was shocked when the Korean immigrant and Harvard-educated molecular biologist I had recently begun dating said he had something to tell me: he was HIV-positive. The shock never really subsided, ...

Were We There to Talk about AIDS, or Not?

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Two Europes, Not Quite the Same

Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in Eastern Europe

April 3, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Yugoslavia was in a state of bloody mayhem. Bullets whistled back and forth across the streets from the weapons of invisible shooters, snipers. But as the shells vied to wipe out passersby, reduce thousand-year-old bridges to dust, and the formerly ‘new’ philosophers vied to shame us, going out of their ...

Feature

How Populists Become Popular

The speculative shift in politics

April 3, 2018 • by Péter Csigó

In the past decades, we have all learned to see politics as a popularity contest where politicians use polls to detect the position of the popular majority and try to sell this position in their media appearances. There is a common tendency to see populist figures like Donald Trump or ...

Blue Monday

Backlash Blues

A reflection on democracy in the streets of Sacramento

April 2, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington On the evening of Sunday, March 18 Stephon Clark was shot to death by officers of the Sacramento Police Department responding to a report that a young black man had been seen vandalizing cars in ...

Education

The Parthenon as a Mediator between Greek Mathematics and Liberal Education

An excerpt from Michael Weinman and Geoff Lehman’s latest book

April 2, 2018 • by Michael Weinman and Geoff Lehman

We propose here to pursue a method of speculative reconstruction to detail what can be learned about the “state of the art” in the early development of “liberal education” in ﬁfth-century Greece. One needs to be cautious in speaking about such a development at such a time, which predates ...