Essays Archive - Page 109 of 131

Public Thinker: an Interview with Kevin Kruse

Why recent history is still history

November 18, 2019 • by Lily Geismer

Thinking in public demands knowledge, eloquence, and courage. In this interview series, we hear from public scholars about how they found their path and how they communicate to a wide audience. “Historian. Author/editor of White Flight; The New Suburban History; Spaces of the Modern City; Fog of War; One Nation Under ...

Migration

Trump’s War on Asylum

November 13, 2019 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

In the summer of 2019, the Administration put in place a policy that denies asylum to any person who has traveled through another country and failed to request asylum in the transit state. It has announced a reduction of refugee admissions to 18,000, a more than 80% cut from the ...

From the Editors

It’s Getting Dark Out There

Thank heaven we all have a laptop and Public Seminar

November 13, 2019 • by Claire Potter

We are also interested in technology this month, with a terrific essay about digital infrastructure and smart factories from Birgit Mahnkopf: to read the second part of this essay, you’ll have to head over to our new friends at Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, a German web magazine in the Eurozine network. Look out ...

The Negro Leagues and Baseball Memory

Washington D.C.’s first championship team

November 11, 2019 • by Robert Greene II

The erasure of the Grays should not be surprising. It has become easy for most fans of the National Pastime to ignore or overlook the contributions of the Negro Leagues. Often, the Negro Leagues are mentioned as a piece of baseball history, both a reminder of Major League Baseball’s shameful ...

Uncategorized

More Productive, Greener, More Peaceful?

The false promises of digital capitalism

November 11, 2019 • by Birgit Mahnkopf

First, for some time, there has been talk of a fourth wave of industrial revolution, which will fundamentally change the global production system. In the Anglo-Saxon context, this wave is referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IOT), while in this country the term "Industry 4.0" has prevailed. Both terms describe the ...

The New School

Sex and the New School

The Case of Henry Cowell

November 11, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes

This incident, in particular the impact imprisonment had on his musical output and reputation, overshadows Cowell’s legacy. What had been a career steeped in daring experimentation became one more conventional and careful. Who supported Cowell and who did not -- notably the composer Charles Ives, who abandoned his friend -- ...

Politics

Damage Done

The Trump–Ukraine controversy in perspective

November 4, 2019 • by Nataliya Gumenyuk

‘It’s all for the best’ I used to tell myself whenever the situation in Ukraine became critical. That was before the release of the transcript of the conversation on 25 July between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. How could this be ‘for the best’? Obviously, Ukraine cannot ...

Democracy

Democrats of the World, Unite!

A Report on the First International Meeting of Democracy Seminar 2.0

October 31, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I proposed the seminar more than a year ago. Since then, we have been developing it here on Public Seminar, as I explained earlier this year. The organizers of this “worldwide network of democratic correspondence,” met for our first face-to-face meeting on October 4 and 5. We gathered in New York, at The New School, on the ...

Europe & Central Asia

Democracy in Poland?

From Authoritarian Populism to Populist Authoritarianism

October 30, 2019 • by Jacek Kucharczyk

The intensity and consistency of the PiS attack on democratic institutions came as a surprise to all but the harshest critics of the party. The experience of Kaczynski’s party’s first stint in government from 2005-2007 – when the authoritarian tendencies of PiS were effectively checked by the courts, independent media, ...

“We all believed our thoughts could save the world.”

Agnes Heller on her life, Lukacs, and Habermas

October 29, 2019 • by Agnes Heller

Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, also 90 years old, is friends with Habermas. And yet, she disagrees with some of his ideas. The philosopher of Jewish descent just barely survived the holocaust. In 1986, she took over Hannah Arendt’s teaching position in New York. --- DIE ZEIT: How did your paths cross with West ...

Democracy

The Theater of Impeachment

An interview with Brenda Wineapple

October 29, 2019 • by Charlotte Slivka

BW: That’s a lot of questions! I had to have a sense of what the story was in order for the narrative could take shape. The entire book took six years to research and to write, but the story came to me after about two years into the research. In other ...

Sex & Gender

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

October 29, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

But I think the more proper question is: “Whose foot?” It’s not about the foot not “actually” being the size of the sun. It's the fact that there's necessarily a subjective relation that changes from person to person. So I think the place where truth becomes important is not actually ...

Essays

Trump’s War on Asylum

It’s Getting Dark Out There

Thank heaven we all have a laptop and Public Seminar

The Negro Leagues and Baseball Memory

Washington D.C.’s first championship team

More Productive, Greener, More Peaceful?

The false promises of digital capitalism

Sex and the New School

The Case of Henry Cowell

Damage Done

The Trump–Ukraine controversy in perspective

Democrats of the World, Unite!

A Report on the First International Meeting of Democracy Seminar 2.0

Democracy in Poland?

From Authoritarian Populism to Populist Authoritarianism

“We all believed our thoughts could save the world.”

Agnes Heller on her life, Lukacs, and Habermas

The Theater of Impeachment

An interview with Brenda Wineapple

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

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