Image credit: DF / Public Seminar
This week I am bidding farewell to Claire Bond Potter, who for the last three years has been my co-executive editor at Public Seminar. More than a colleague, Claire is a friend who has also been a comrade in arms during some challenging times.
Claire is retiring from The New School as well as from her post as co-executive editor of Public Seminar, in part to focus on her own writing.
An academic historian by training, she published her first trade book with Basic in 2020, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy. Besides being a beloved teacher at The New School and, before that, Wesleyan University, Claire was a pioneering blogger, whose “Tenured Radical” column was hosted from 2011 to 2015 at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Since Claire is staying on as a contributing editor at Public Seminar, you’ll still be seeing her stuff on a regular basis. When she’s not up on our site, you’ll find her on Substack, where her “Political Junkie” newsletter offers incisive commentary on politics, culture and media; or in the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dissent, or Jacobin. She’ll also be working on what is sure to be the definitive biography of Susan Brownmiller, the veteran feminist, activist, and journalist.
As I say farewell to my co-executive editor, we at Public Seminar wanted to treat our readers to our own personal selection of some of Claire’s greatest hits, harvested from the archives of Public Seminar.
With her historical insight and gimlet eye for the absurdities of academia, as well as the horrors of American politics, Claire has a knack for knocking out stories that remain—even as the news cycle moves on—evergreen.
Here are some perennial favorites.
—Jim Miller, Executive Editor of Public Seminar
