Politics Archives - Public Seminar

What Does the State Want Us to See?

On the cancelled livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution

October 30, 2026 • by Safiyah Rochelle

When US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proposed livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major and psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, he extended an invitation to the public: log on to your preferred device and watch the state kill. The invitation expanded the ...

Europe & Central Asia

Will Hungary’s Liberation From Orbán Lead to Lasting Democratization?

Even as it ousts the old guard, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party must exercise the power of a supermajority with caution

October 28, 2026 • by Imre Szijarto

This April, the celebrations in Budapest evoked images of the fall of the Berlin Wall: hundreds of thousands poured into the streets, teens climbed on top of buildings, and twenty-somethings in baggy thrifted jeans chanted old slogans of the 1956 revolution against Stalinist tyranny. After 16 years of gradual entrenchment, ...

Will Hungary’s Liberation From Orbán Lead to Lasting Democratization?

Reviews

When Disintegration Becomes Political Desire

Understanding the far right in Brazil and beyond in Rodrigo Nunes’s Anatomy of Disintegration

October 21, 2026 • by Felippe Ramos

Over the past decade, the rise of far-right movements has unsettled democracies across the globe, from Latin America and the United States to many countries in Europe. In his new book Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right (Haymarket 2026), Rodrigo Nunes argues that the rise ...

When Disintegration Becomes Political Desire

History

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

On David Griscom’s new book, The Myth of Red Texas

October 19, 2026 • by Philip Dray

For the past 50 years, Texas has been a GOP stronghold. Despite the good efforts of figures such as Beto O’Rourke, Barbara Jordan, and Ann Richards, the state has remained firmly in the grip of big business, big oil, and a conservative legislature. But as David Griscom observes in his new book, The Myth of ...

When Texans Were Socialist Revolutionaries

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 ...

Activism

Art for the Front Lines

An interview with activist-artist Susan Simensky Bietila

September 25, 2026 • by Julie Allan and Susan Simensky Bietila

A large heron flew over the shore of Lake Michigan at dusk, with cardboard wings spanning sixteen feet—the width of the four activists who held up the puppet’s structural rods. Its wings flapped up and down in the wind. In 2016, demonstrators carried the heron as they marched to celebrate ...

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

Activism

Waiting for Revolution in Bangladesh

On the fortnight before the July 2024 uprising

September 21, 2026 • by Ned Wontner

Fourteen days before Bangladesh’s 2024 revolution, I arrived in Dhaka. The plane, half-empty, held Bangladeshi construction workers returning from Malaysia, one South Korean businessman, and myself. I had no real plans beyond spending a couple of weeks with activists and political scientists in Dhaka. They were friends, colleagues, and strangers ...

Activism

Occupy, Fifteen Years Later

What does today’s Left owe to those nights at Zuccotti Park?

September 17, 2026 • by Nara Roberta Silva

On September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and launched the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Claiming to embody the “99%,” the movement showcased the idea of a great majority pitted against a tiny, immensely powerful minority. While ceaseless debates about Occupy’s ...

Genocide

Windows

A new translation of Keinheimisch

September 10, 2026 • by Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus

Introductory Note: Keinheimisch (Ullstein Verlage, 2025) weaves together personal experience, literary analysis, and political theory: Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus draws on his grandparents' stories—Holocaust survivors and Nakba participants alike—and his own upbringing in a militarized society to trace how Jewish indigeneity in the land is constantly reasserted, and how that reassertion curdles into ...

Prisons and Police

How to Incentivize Justice

The Price of Mercy makes clear the human toll when we employ a criminal legal system that prioritizes punishment over progress

August 31, 2026 • by Emma Robertson

Emily Galvin Almanza is a former public defender and the cofounder of advocacy group Partners for Justice. Her legal career boasts impressive accomplishments and accolades, and yet, as Almanza herself recognizes in the opening pages of her debut book, The Price of Mercy (Crown 2026), her life would likely be ...

Labor

Tariffs to Eliminate Forced Labor

Trump’s cynical, ineffective and misguided trade policy

August 27, 2026 • by Thomas Liess and William Milberg

President Trump’s latest effort to impose tariffs on 60 trading partners (collectively accounting for 99.4 percent of US imports) is the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to tax them for failing “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with ...