Uncategorized Archives - Public Seminar

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What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

A premier journal that pioneered a literary form has gone dark, and readers want to know why

March 1, 2023 • by Vicky Oliver

Was the decades-old, and recently suspended, Creative Nonfiction doomed? Is it even dead? ...

What’s the Story at Creative Nonfiction?

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You Have Some Unfinished Business!

From architectural ruins to grocery lists to high-end fashion, is there something attractive about being incomplete?

February 28, 2023 • by Palak Godara

The possibility that my endless to-do lists are a form of ambition and memory-banking fills me with a happy sense of resolution....

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Paradoxes of Free Speech

How the amplification of limitless speech acts can silence others

February 21, 2023 • by Peter Nohrnberg

Our culture’s fetishizing of self-expression, apparently without any limits, is paradoxically undermining free speech....

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Why Does a Powerful Nation Form an Alliance with a Minor Power?

The India-Armenia arms deal opens a window on the value of asymmetrical alliances

February 14, 2023 • by Georgi Asatryan

India-Armenia relations have been actively developing in recent years. In a series of consultations and meetings, India and Armenia have signed defense deals, a significant development in the global arms trade. For India, a great power, this was the first export deal of its weapons, while Armenia, a minor power, ...

Why Does a Powerful Nation Form an Alliance with a Minor Power?

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Behind Milan’s Millennial Renaissance

The hidden costs of becoming an Instagrammable global city

October 27, 2022 • by Giorgio Fontana

I love Milan. I was born in its suburbs and have been living here for fifteen years; it’s still a very special place, a unique city in Italy. But its ruling class (and its residents) must tackle the problem of architectural and social inequality seriously before this place swallows itself....

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Grief Creates an Opportunity for Love

When we mourn, we can emulate the acts of grace that have enriched our lives

July 6, 2022 • by Harold Pollack

Love and grief are not zero-sum games, but they sometimes feel that way in complicated, blended, or fractured families....

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Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology

The challenge of hosting the divine

May 20, 2022 • by Wendy Doniger

Greek epic and tragedy abound in cautionary tales about people who violated the basic rules of hospitality to guests and strangers and then paid the price, even when the visitors were not gods but merely human strangers. ...

Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology

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For Want of Wild Beasts

For many in Eastern Europe, prison was the hallmark of Communism. Today, the United States is experiencing its own carceral society. What can be learnt from this comparison and can we redefine the term “political prisoner”?

February 1, 2022 • by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Marci Shore

How do we understand both the uses and disadvantages of thinking across time and space? How do we negotiate the fact that in any biography or historical event, there are both elements that are unique, and elements that are universal? For me, these questions belonged to a larger question: namely, ...

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How COVID-19 Became a Crisis

To understand what went wrong, look at how the problem is framed

November 3, 2021 • by Janet Roitman

We are in crisis. Nothing could be more self-evident: a global pandemic has ravaged the human species. But wait—what does it mean to call an open-ended event that is playing out over a period of years a “crisis"? If humans live with viruses, how is Covid-19, and the diseases it triggers, a crisis for the human species and our ...

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Drone Strikes and Civilian Casualties

Will admitting a “tragic mistake” change the way we wage war?

September 21, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

Last Friday, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie of U.S. Central Command admitted that the August 29 drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that the U.S. had claimed hit ISIS-K fighters had instead killed 10 civilians, including seven children. This “tragic mistake,” as he called it, at the very end of the ...

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Retiring Does Not Mean Throwing in the Towel

Closing one chapter on work allows so much else to begin

August 11, 2021 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

_____ I’m out of there! I’ve stepped down as a tenured professor at The New School for Social Research. I came up through the ranks, advancing from Assistant Professor to Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology. Along the way, there were stints as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Liberal ...

Retiring Does Not Mean Throwing in the Towel

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Slavery Made Economic Thinking Possible

An excerpt from “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic”

June 14, 2021 • by Jennifer L. Morgan

_____ In the 1640s, as a child, Elizabeth Keye found herself misidentified on an estate in Virginia. A white boy named John Keye called her “Black Besse.” Overhearing it, the overseer’s wife “checked him and said[,] Sirra you must call her Sister for shee is your Sister,” whereupon “the said John Keye ...