Politics Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

Interviews

The Cultural Marxism Bogeyman

An interview with author A. J. A. Woods on their new book about the Right’s favorite conspiracy theory

July 27, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum and A. J. A. Woods

A specter is haunting the West—the specter of Cultural Marxism. Or at least that’s what many conservative operatives would like us to think. From military theorist William S. Lind to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prominent right-wingers deploy “Cultural Marxism” as a catch-all for the forces behind our reputed decline: feminism, ...

The Right

William S. Lind and His Single-Factor Explanation of History

How William S. Lind—a former director of the Free Congress Foundation’s Center for Cultural Conservatism—used the phrase “Cultural Marxism” as a delegitimizing tool

July 27, 2026 • by A. J. A. Woods

In July 1998, Lind was invited to speak at an Accuracy in Academia (AIA) conference. Founded in 1985, AIA was set up to expose instances of political bias on American campuses. Its founder, Reed Irvine, believed that universities were indoctrinating students with progressive ideologies rather than teaching them facts and ...

William S. Lind and His Single-Factor Explanation of History

Politics

Against “Peace and Love”

A review of Hate: The Uses of a Powerful Emotion

July 6, 2026 • by L. Zhang

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein rushed to praise the far-right activist for, he wrote, “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” Klein lauded the Turning Points USA founder’s approach to civil political debate on college campuses. The column brushed over the fact that ...

Interviews

Practical Prison Abolition

An interview with Anna Terwiel on how thinking about justice in terms of personal experience can disrupt the belief that safety requires violent state intervention

June 23, 2026 • by Anna Terwiel and Madeline Trice

There are nearly two million people incarcerated in the United States. The idea of an end to the mass incarceration of those deemed criminal is perceived as far-fetched, naive, or unrealistic. But political scholar Anna Terwiel disagrees. In her new book, Prison Abolition for Realists (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), ...