Public Seminar is LIVE from #CPAC2018

Thursday, February 22 2018

3:20 PM: Ted Cruz is absolutely running for President in 2020. Cruz ran onto the stage with that candidate look, waving and spreading his arms wide to make himself look bigger than he is. "I love CPAC!" he shouted, and for the first time since I entered the press pen, the conversation ...
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Public Seminar is LIVE from #CPAC2018

After the Parkland Massacre, What?

A conversation between left and right about gun control

Joseph Castillo and I met in the fall of 1976 as first year students at Yale University. He was from the southwest, I was from the Northeast; he was a science major, and I was an English major. Joe became an engineer and entrepreneur and I became a history professor, ...
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After the Parkland Massacre, What?

Moanin’

On gun violence in the United States

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington There was another school shooting this past week. This one was at a high school in Parkland, Florida. A disgruntled and clearly disturbed 19-year-old former student arrived on school grounds with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, entered ...
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Moanin’

The Sidewinder

Race, resistance, and the blues

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington In the past week I have thought often about “The Sidewinder.” “The Sidewinder” is a famous jazz standard written by the late, great trumpeter Lee Morgan, which appeared on his 1964 album of the same name. ...
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The Sidewinder

Blue Monday: Monday Morning Blues

An introduction to my new column

Readers of Public Seminar will know that in the past couple of years I have become a regular and indeed somewhat relentless contributor of political essays on the dangers of Trumpism and the challenges to liberal democracy. I have greatly enjoyed working with the PS staff, and have been especially happy to collaborate with ...
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Blue Monday: Monday Morning Blues

A Conversation We Must Not Stop Having

The #MeToo movement

I tried to speak out. I told our homeroom teacher and she yelled at the boys in our class in front of the girls, telling them that this was wrong. But no real disciplinary measures were taken. Most of the boys (at least in my class) engaged in non-consensual touching, ...
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A Conversation We Must Not Stop Having

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part II

Below is the second segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. While Kojève offered us a fully formed taxonomy of authority, complete with four pure types of authority and their attendant legitimating theories, Hannah Arendt in her text On Violence, published ...
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Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Concepts of control in Kojeve and Arendt, Part I

Below is the first segment of a three-part series adapted from a final paper for Sociology of Power and Authority at UVA. The specific characteristics of political authority, political power, and political violence have only grown more complex in the modern era, and the lessons offered by philosophers of the past ...
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Recognizing Authority, Acknowledging Power

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Manually Bending the Arc of Time Towards Justice

Speech by Dr. Kristopher Burrell, January 16, 2017, St. Paul’s Church -- National Historic Site, Mount Vernon, NY Good afternoon, everyone. It is my pleasure to be here at St. Paul’s Church on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Dr. King would have turned 88 years of age yesterday. I would ...
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Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sociology of Power and Authority

Fall 2017 at University of Virginia

The Sociology of Power and Authority was offered in Fall 2017 at the University of Virginia. It was an upper-division undergraduate seminar with 20 students, meeting for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. On the first day of the course, several students revealed, unprompted, that they had been ...
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Sociology of Power and Authority

Milo in Berkeley

Further reflections on the renewed academic free speech debate

What light if any, I will ask here, does this claim shine on the larger discourse about academic free speech, specifically as that discussion has come to focus, for historical and strategic reasons, on UC-Berkeley. The proximal cause of Berkeley’s centrality is the shutdown of an intended speech by Milo ...
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Milo in Berkeley