Politics Archives - Public Seminar

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. ...

Activism

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

An eyewitness report from Israel

March 4, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

I spent the summer of 2025 in a state of rage about events in Israel. Every day, I read in the liberal daily Haaretz of settler attacks in the West Bank on Palestinians and the Israeli activists who were defending them. Rage has long been my normal state, but I ...

Putting Everything on the Line for the Palestinians

Colonization

A House in the Middle of the Road

The cannibal colonization of homes and roads during Palestine’s Great Revolt

March 2, 2026 • by Chris Harding

I spent the summer of 2025 in Bayt Lahm (Bethlehem), conducting archival research in the Jacir family’s historic dar, a beautiful two-story home built in the nineteenth century from Jerusalem stone. Taking a break one afternoon, I watched a short film, Mehdi Amel:The Colonial Mode of Production (2024), by the ...

Politics

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

If constitutional constraints are real limits on government power, their violation must sometimes justify the same defensive responses that other rights violations justify

January 22, 2026 • by Michael Gregory

If you saw an armed stranger in body armor forcing his way into your neighbor's home at dawn, dragging a screaming mother away from her children while pointing a rifle at the family, would you have the right to stop him? By any means necessary? Now the forbidden version: What if ...

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

Politics

Switzerland, January 22

After the thugs

January 22, 2026 • by Adam Tooze

Walking past the pavilion proclaiming “Freedom 250.” The blank metal of the decaled window frames, evokes nothing of the sort. Faded wraps in red, white, and blue remind one of a gambling parlor in some bedraggled third-tier pedestrian mall. Or of the sort of images that enthusiastic men glue to cars and motorbikes. Strip ...

North America

One Battle After Another

With ICE in Minneapolis: An eyewitness account

January 21, 2026 • by Emily Condon

On Tuesday morning, January 13, I was driving home after dropping my 9-year-old son off at school. There were ICE vehicles everywhere, I was surrounded by them on Park Ave. After a block or two of this, I parked and got out of my car. I saw that there were many ...

Politics

“Things Happen”

On one’s sense of impending doom

January 20, 2026 • by Arthur Goldhammer

Americans have long enjoyed a robust and righteous sense of impunity. No matter how badly our government blundered, we nevertheless clung confidently to the notion that we would always land on our feet. It has been said (allegedly by Bismarck, but there is little evidence to support the attribution) that “there ...

Interviews

Finding the Equator

A conversation on the failures of Western media after Gaza and a new cosmopolitan publication that answers the call for change

December 17, 2025 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Suzy Hansen

Suzy Hansen is an author and journalist whose work examines the blind spots of American liberalism and the failures of Western journalism. She is one of the founding editors of Equator, a new online publication created in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, to address censorship in liberal media coverage. ...