Politics Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

Politics

Marco Rubio in Dante’s Inferno

His orazion picciola at Munich, and the fate of Republican oratory post-Trump

May 18, 2026 • by Daniel DiMassa

It hasn’t escaped the commentariat that, among other things, the appeal of Trumpism is rhetorical. “I love the way he talks,” a supporter told Vanity Fair in 2020. “I understand him more than any other president.” Iterations of the same remark have become a refrain over the last decade. There ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

May 12, 2026 • by Rida Chaudhry and Areeb Zuaiter

A decade ago, filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter was glued to her screen watching the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza when a different kind of video interrupted her feed: smiling young men laughing between backflips as bombs darkened the sky behind them. The Nablus-born documentarian was partly curious and partly enamored with ...

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

Film & Performing Arts

Think Happy Thoughts

An excerpt from The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World

May 11, 2026 • by Vicky Osterweil

In the wake of the animator’s strike, Walt’s reflexive conservatism turned into a frothing anti-communism. But while his politics grew more unhinged and hateful, his creative output turned definitively toward the production of nostalgia. Song of the South’s reenvisioning of plantation childhood was one particularly egregious example, as was Peter ...

Philosophy

Teaching Skepticism in Kyiv and Nablus

Close attention can foster compassion and spur action

April 16, 2026 • by Peter Levine

In 2025, I gave lectures and classes in Kyiv, Ukraine, and at two Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank. I have lived a tame life, and these were relatively intense experiences for me. As I had anticipated, Kyiv was heavily bombed while I visited, and I taught in a bomb shelter. ...

Middle East & North Africa

The Political Perimeter

Francesca Albanese and the limits of international humanitarian law

April 15, 2026 • by Coleson Smith

In the wake of the Gaza War, a place in time that has become its own world-historical moment, the invocation of international law as a means of remedying Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians rings hollow. After all, did bombs not continue to fall on Gaza even after South Africa brought ...

Middle East & North Africa

Street Tulips

The outbreak of war has exposed, and exacerbated, fault lines in the Iranian diaspora

April 13, 2026 • by M. B. Molavi

In search of a flower, I spent one day in early March going to plant shops and market stalls in central Malmö, Sweden. I was looking for something in particular: the laleh-ye vazhgoon, the inverted tulip. A reddish mountain flower that grows in the Zagros, the ancestral lands of the ...

The Left

Publishing and Publics

Discussing the realities of political journalism in 2026

April 1, 2026 • by Natalie Adler, Hira Ahmed, Natasha Lennard, Edward Ongweso Jr, Matt Peterson, Nick Pinto and Colin Vanderburg

Friday the thirteenth felt like a fitting day to gather a group of independent writers and editors for a discussion on the current state of political publishing. On February 13, Natasha Lennard, Intercept columnist and Associate Director for the New School for Social Research’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (CPCJ) MA program joined Matt ...

Activism

Children of 2008

A guide to the changing landscape of the labor movement

March 12, 2026 • by Dave Kamper

Solidarity, we’ve always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked ...

Interviews

The Return of the Oppressed

A conversation with Robert Fieseler on American Scare and the recovery of queer history long obscured by state censorship

March 11, 2026 • by Robert W. Fieseler and Katelyn Kimberlin

“I kept wondering why it felt like we were all living in the United States of Florida,” says Robert W. Fieseler. In his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (Penguin Random House, 2025), Fieseler examines the forces shaping the fastest-growing state in the ...

Activism

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Documentary photographer Nancy Richards Farese captures the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the US’s shutdown of foreign aid

March 9, 2026 • by Nancy Richards Farese

In Przemyśl, a small city on the Ukrainian–Polish border, the train station has become something of a moral center. Late one November evening, fluorescent lights glare against steel rails as the night train from Kyiv pulls in late—again. The delay is familiar now. Russian forces bombed the rail line earlier ...

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...