Psyche Archives - Public Seminar

Psyche

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

On self-identity and the philosophy of addiction

February 10, 2026 • by Hanna Pickard

Reader, I do not know who you are. In particular, I do not know whether you use drugs, whether you are addicted to drugs, or whether, in addition to being addicted to drugs, you identify as an addict. If you do identify as an addict, I hope to speak to ...

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

Psyche

“Masc Only”

When gender conformity is enforced everywhere from laws to dating apps, opacity becomes a site of resistance

September 30, 2025 • by Yann Phesans

A gay man lowers his voice in the boardroom. A trans woman is detained at border control when her appearance does not match her passport photo. A nonbinary teenager avoids mirrors. A butch lesbian is asked to leave the women’s changing room for “making others uncomfortable.” These are not moments of ...

Literature

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Capitalism

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

If somebody really hasn’t already raided the loot, maybe the administration will show us how it’s done

May 20, 2025 • by Justin Joque

The Trump-Musk right repeatedly insists on revealing the true state of the world and of digging this true world out from under the distortions of liberal modernity. From Pizzagate to attacks on DEI, there exists a constant insistence on revealing what is hidden, mediated, and obfuscated. But nowhere is the ...

We’re Going to Fort Knox to Touch the Real

Literature

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

In dark times, the sacred work is not to flee but to testify

May 14, 2025 • by Yahia Lababidi

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the ...

Whitman, Spiritual Decay, and the Last Light of American Faith

Philosophy

Martha Stewart’s Tripartite Soul

The ambitious Martha Stewart would never want to go to prison. The spirited Martha Stewart is willing to negotiate.

April 14, 2025 • by Anabelle Helsell

Anabelle Helsell on how the collapse of the personal and public in Martha Stewart's career echoes the warnings of Plato’s Republic....

Interviews

Generations of Women in The Witches of El Paso

“The rules are going to be broken”

December 11, 2024 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa and Luis Jaramillo

In his debut novel, The Witches of El Paso (Primero Sueño Press and Atria Books, 2024), Luis Jaramillo provides readers a sweeping multi-generational story about Nena, a woman living in World War II–era El Paso who begs for a new life and finds herself transported to colonial Mexico, where she ...

Generations of Women in <em>The Witches of El Paso</em>

Media

From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

Why are my friends talking like incels?

October 7, 2024 • by Jake Neuffer

“Been gymmaxxing lately,” my friend quipped as he made a protein shake. “Proteinpilled too,” I said. My generation is speaking a new slang—new to us, anyway. Not quite ubiquitous, but familiar to that contingent of chronically online youth (and is that phrase not becoming a tautology?). These are phrases borrowed from incels, ...

From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

North America

When Politicians Make Nice

A conversation with sociologist Julia Sonnevend about her new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics

September 11, 2024 • by Claire Potter and Julia Sonnevend

When United States president Joe Biden stumbled on the debate stage on June 27, 2024, it wasn’t that he just seemed old, it was that a man who had charmed voters for half a century with his bright smile, kindness, and folksy quips seemed to have vanished. ...

Middle East & North Africa

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Mourning and motherland

June 20, 2024 • by Jordan Osserman

Within left-leaning circles, any attempt articulate an emotional tie to Israel is fraught—understandably, given the scandalous forms of censorship and repression facing Palestinian perspectives in the mainstream....

Israel Has Weaponized Trauma. Should We Talk About It?

Gender

The Furies Reconsidered

A review of Elizabeth Flock’s new book on women and vengeance

June 3, 2024 • by Gregory Laski

Read as a book about how institutions disempower women, The Furies makes the kind of actions that the three characters take seem not only reasonable but necessary for their survival. ...