From the Editors Archives - Page 95 of 171

Feature

The Political Chill of Snow

Anti-Semitism, Populism, and the Present

March 25, 2018 • by Andrew Seal

In New Hampshire -- where I live -- decisions to cancel classes are based more on what time the snow stops falling rather than how much snow is expected to fall. If it stops early enough the night before, school will be open the next day, whether the snow gauge ...

Feature

The Fox News-Fake News-Trump Nexus

On the link between political orientation and the inclination to believe fake news

March 24, 2018 • by Sanford Schram and Richard Fording

In today’s overheated political climate, people are increasingly noting how difficult it is to convince others, who disagree, to alter their beliefs. Public discourse seems ever more compartmentalized in “silos,” where people express themselves in an “echo chamber” or “bubble” that reinforces their pre-existing biases. Contravening facts rarely get in ...

Feature

The Practical and Principled Gray Argument for Democratic Party Solidarity

Reflections of an Unreconstructed Deaniac

March 23, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am a committed partisan of “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” and have been so ever since Howard Dean ran for Democratic nomination to be President of the United States in 2004. I worked for his candidacy, wrote about it in The Politics of Small Things, and later wrote about ...

The Practical and Principled Gray Argument for Democratic Party Solidarity

Feature

Authenticity, American Style

The meaning of authenticity in the era of “reality show” politics

March 23, 2018 • by Jeremy Safran

In her 2012 book The Politics of Authenticity in American Presidential Campaigns, Erica Seifert documents the growing importance over a 25-year period of the voters’ perception of candidates’ authenticity in determining the outcome of presidential elections. In recent years Al Gore, John Kerry and Mitt Romney’s bids for the presidency were all ...

Feature

Making Knowledge Available

The media of generous scholarship

March 22, 2018 • by Shannon Mattern

A few weeks ago, shortly after reading that Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, had made over €1 billion in profit in 2017, I received notice of a new journal issue on decolonization and media.* “Decolonization” denotes the dismantling of imperialism, the overturning of systems of domination, and the founding ...

Feature

Crossing Ironbound Borders

A journey of environmental justice

March 22, 2018 • by Ana I. Baptista

When I was a child, the city of Newark, New Jersey was often the punchline of bad jokes about urban blight and decay. But to me it was home. And it shaped my understanding of what I would dedicate my life to pursuing: Environmental justice. Growing up in a place called ...

Feature

Is (Cynthia) Nixon the One?

The yearning for celebrity candidates

March 21, 2018 • by Claire Potter

I had heard the rumors that Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon planned to primary New York's Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo, but I didn't believe them. It made so little sense to me that I ignored it until yesterday, when Nixon actually declared her candidacy. According to the Siena College poll ...

Feature

Rex Tillerson, Women’s Obituaries, and National Geographic

Past Present Episode 123

March 21, 2018 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil debate Donald Trump’s firing of Rex Tillerson, the New York Times publishing obituaries for women it overlooked historically, and National Geographic’s self-study of its past racist coverage.

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Rex Tillerson, Women’s Obituaries, and National Geographic

Feature

Who Is Allowed to Speak For North Koreans?

Narratives of Captivity and Freedom

March 21, 2018 • by Reid Mitchell

The Southern Slavocracy’s obsession with people escaping slavery helped create anti-slavery feeling in the rest of the United States. The Slavocracy viewed these escapes as threats to the viability of the South’s Peculiar Institution. But until the Civil War, very few of the black people held in slavery did escape. ...

Who Is Allowed to Speak For North Koreans?

Feature

Fake Art and Inauthenticity in Philosophy

A review of Santiago Zabala’s ‘Why Only Art Can Save Us’

March 20, 2018 • by Paul A. Kottman

It was reported in the Washington Post that the Trump White House had asked to borrow Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting Landscape with Snow from the Guggenheim Museum in New York in order to display it in the President’s private quarters. [1] The request for the Van Gogh was refused. In its place, the Guggenheim offered ...

Fake Art and Inauthenticity in Philosophy

Education

What Walkouts Teach Students

A Report from San Diego

March 20, 2018 • by Elaine Lewinnek

Sometimes in San Diego County, when too many people run their air-conditioning all at once, we have blackouts. The first time a blackout happened after I moved here, one neighbor shouted across the street to me: “There’s a blackout! I think it might be terrorism! But don’t worry, I have ...

Blue Monday

Stormy Weather

Trump in trouble

March 19, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Spring approaches. But for Donald Trump, the bane of our existence, Winter is coming still. Just this past week and a half, as another Noreaster made its way across the east coast, the tempest that is the Trump ...