Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad

Did the sexual monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have cultural roots?

Harvey Weinstein—like Jeffrey Epstein—was the product not of a liberated sexuality gone haywire but of a liberated sexuality that passed them by when it mattered most. ...

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Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad

Reimagining Nature—The High Line Experiment

How plant design preserved the High Line for a city craving natural space

Meandering around the gardens, it is easy to imagine the trees, shrubs, and ferns just sprouting between the rusty tracks. In reality, it takes a lot of effort from the gardening team, working behind the scenes, to maintain the pastoral ambience. ...

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Reimagining Nature—The High Line Experiment

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production; Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber proposes that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized

Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us...

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Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The Rise of Humanitarian Corridors

How a lay Catholic community mobilized a transnational response to wartime refugee crises

The type of global public religion that the Sant’ Egidio community offers no silver bullet for those who are internally displaced or pushed across borders. And yet, secularism and secularists cannot combat these crises alone. Although a magical solution is not at hand, a certain form of help is. The ...
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The Rise of Humanitarian Corridors

The Measurement of Loss

What do I take with me? How much can I carry when on foot?

The flight of the refugee is not, as I understand it, migration. Although the boundary can be fluid, not all those who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean, for example, are refugees. The two must be differentiated to protect the refugee against the threat of terminological arbitrariness....

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Disney City, USA

Beware Disney’s new residential communities

Disney last week announced a new plan to build entire residential communities, a major move into real estate that’s disconnected from its current theme parks and their surroundings. It’s calling the initiative “Storyliving.” The first of these neighborhoods will be in Rancho Mirage, California, and is supposed to include homes, a ...
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Disney City, USA

At the Border

Going into Poland’s forests to help migrants gave me a sense of peace but the journey is far from over

Before leaving for Podlachia I naively assumed that my trip would have a beginning and an end, that I would gain a better understanding of the ongoing crisis and the role people such as myself could play in it. I seem to have reached some geographical and symbolic end. However, ...
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At the Border

Are White People Really in Decline?

No, but when the mainstream media reports changing racial demographics as a contest for social domination, they validate white supremacists’ worst fears

_____ When the United States Census Bureau released its 2020 census on August 12, 2021, the news media highlighted two important trends in race and ethnicity: a drop in the number of white people and a rise in the number of people who identify with more than one racial group. Both facts represent ...
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Are White People Really in Decline?

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Alexandra Kleeman chats with Helen Schulman about her new book, Something New Under the Sun

_____ Upon the publication of her new novel, Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman sat down with Helen Schulman, faculty and fiction chair at the Creative Writing program, to talk about Los Angeles, the climate crisis, and writing about the very near future. The interview was presented by the Creative Writing ...
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A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

A Patch of Moonlight

Darwin’s warning

_____ Rustles of the night in the Nilgiri Hills. I sit behind the low wall of a veranda beside Priya who invited me here, her husband Jean Philippe, and her brother Peter. They are scientists and naturalists. This is what they do every night. I am very lucky to be their ...
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A Patch of Moonlight

Can Refugee Scholars Hold the Line?

Why the theoretical line that separates forced migrants from other persons on the move may not be sustainable

_____ My title doesn’t refer to whether refugee scholars should help others fend off attacks from governments and populist parties that are intent on destroying the international protection regimes we study. Most of us are already so engaged. Rather, I am asking a conceptual question about the nature of refugee scholarship: does ...
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Can Refugee Scholars Hold the Line?