Habitats Archives - Public Seminar

Habitats

The Last Phone Box in Sharrington

In a small English village, a community mobilizes against bureaucracy

October 6, 2026 • by Nicholas Cooke

In places like this, where signal is patchy, and a public phone is still available to walkers, drivers, and older residents, infrequent use is not the same thing as no need....

Europe & Central Asia

The Magic Bridge

The mythic promise of the world’s longest suspension bridge

September 29, 2026 • by Giuliano Beniamino Fleri

On June 7, 1955, the Italian national newspaper La Stampa announced—with the pompous optimism typical of the postwar years—that “work on the bridge over the Strait of Messina will begin in one month.” The bridge would stretch across the Mediterranean to connect Messina, the port city at the northeastern corner ...

Migration

Temporary Protection, Permanent Precarity

The human consequences of terminating TPS

September 23, 2026 • by Georges E. Fouron and Nina Glick Schiller

In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that in South Florida several home health care agencies were closing, “nursing homes are scrambling to fill vacant positions and restaurants are scaling back operating hours. Hotels, retailers, airport contractors and small businesses are also grappling with new staffing shortages.” Meanwhile, in neighborhoods such as New ...

Temporary Protection, Permanent Precarity

Interviews

Take Back the City

An interview with Samuel Stein on his new book, A Right to Housing?

September 16, 2026 • by Samuel Stein and Andreas Petrossiants

Samuel Stein’s A Right to Housing? asks more than just the titular question, but it does sit with a particularly troubling dilemma: are we crazy to keep fighting? As the book jacket describes, it offers both a “radical blueprint for universal housing” and an “unflinching assessment of why we haven’t won,” split ...

Health care

When the Young Lords and Black Panthers Occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx

How my father, the Panthers, and the Young Lords negotiated for the improved care that became the blueprint for the patient’s bill of rights

July 29, 2026 • by Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur

The below excerpt is taken from This Thug’s Life (Dafina, 2026), the first-ever insider account of the Shakur family, the iconic hip hop group T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., and the life and death Tupac Shakur—written by Mopreme Shakur, the legendary rapper’s big brother and eldest son of Black liberation activist Mutulu Shakur. In ...

When the Young Lords and Black Panthers Occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx

Migration

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

The irregular border crossing is a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies

June 4, 2026 • by Rachel Charney McKenzie

On September 25, 2023, about 30 miles southeast of Montreal, a lime-green excavator advanced like a centipede over concrete and gravel. Its claw-like appendage tore at the gable roof of a long white rectangular building. The structure’s walls folded inward under the pressure, and the ghost of a dark blue ...

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

Climate & Ecology

A Staggering Reversal of Assumptions

Adam Tooze and Natasha Lennard discuss our current moment of bizarre juxtapositions in global politics

May 18, 2026 • by Natasha Lennard and Adam Tooze

Renowned historian Adam Tooze returned to The New School last month to reflect on this moment of dramatic geopolitical rupture. President Donald Trump’s unjustified and unjustifiable war against Iran has shown the fragility of the fossil fuel-based energetic order. At the very same moment, China’s meteoric rise as the world’s ...

Climate & Ecology

We Need Industrial Agriculture

Local small farms offer an ideal of food production, but only industrial agriculture can meet modern needs

April 29, 2026 • by Rafael Gonzalez

When I think about farming, I imagine the simple farming my Filipino great-grandfather did, and that students at my alma mater, Amherst College, still do at the Book & Plow Farm, an organic operation that employs students part time and supplies the college dining hall. Many consider this an ideal form ...

Climate & Ecology

Beneath the Surface

An excerpt from The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late

April 9, 2026 • by Judith Enck and Adam Mahoney

Beneath the tranquil surface of the water, a slow-moving crisis is unfolding—one that is quietly, yet relentlessly, reshaping life on Earth. Each year, millions of tons of plastic make their way into the oceans, hitching a ride from the land through streams and rivers. This plastic doesn’t disappear; instead, it ...

Climate & Ecology

Solar Express

In Here Comes the Sun, climate activist and author Bill McKibben experiments with the power of positive thinking

February 26, 2026 • by Shea Dean

What motivates people to work for social change—and work for it fast? In his most recent book, Here Comes the Sun (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025), the veteran climate reporter Bill McKibben tries to answer that question by presenting two truths. The first is that we are now in ...

Climate & Ecology

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

February 24, 2026 • by Katya Wack

A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), the new novel by Megha Majumdar, unfolds over a single week in a not-so-distant future. Kolkata has been devastated by flooding and famine; Ma, a middle-class shelter manager, is preparing to flee the city with her father and two-year-old daughter to join her ...

Urban Environments

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito

Why is it important to interpret Portsmouth's history of urban renewal as a history of class? So far, historians who have published work on the subject have chosen not to take this angle. All contemporary writing on Puddle Dock and the North End—the city's two neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal—notes ...

Habitats

The Last Phone Box in Sharrington

In a small English village, a community mobilizes against bureaucracy

The Magic Bridge

The mythic promise of the world’s longest suspension bridge

Temporary Protection, Permanent Precarity

The human consequences of terminating TPS

Take Back the City

An interview with Samuel Stein on his new book, A Right to Housing?

When the Young Lords and Black Panthers Occupied Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx

How my father, the Panthers, and the Young Lords negotiated for the improved care that became the blueprint for the patient’s bill of rights

Three Years After Roxham, Canada Still Scapegoats US Immigration Law

The irregular border crossing is a metonym for the complications of Canada’s changing immigration policies

A Staggering Reversal of Assumptions

Adam Tooze and Natasha Lennard discuss our current moment of bizarre juxtapositions in global politics

We Need Industrial Agriculture

Local small farms offer an ideal of food production, but only industrial agriculture can meet modern needs

Beneath the Surface

An excerpt from The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late

Solar Express

In Here Comes the Sun, climate activist and author Bill McKibben experiments with the power of positive thinking

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

Class, Hegemony, and the Will to End a Neighborhood

An excerpt from The Tears of Other People: A history and memoir of displacement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

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