Essays Archive - Page 110 of 131

In Her Own Way, She Lived as a Philosopher

Jurgen Habermas Remembers Agnes Heller

October 29, 2019 • by Jurgen Habermas

This year, when with a guilty conscience and much too late I congratulated her for her 90th birthday, Agnes Heller replied without a trace of hurt feelings: “Well wishes are never too late.” Death notices, however, always come too soon. To the very end, Agnes Heller was a person full ...

Democracy

The Impeachers

The Trial Of Andrew Johnson And The Dream Of A Just Nation

October 29, 2019 • by Brenda Wineapple

“Andrew Johnson was the queerest man who ever occupied the White House,” one of his colleagues remembered. As Lincoln’s Vice President, thrust into the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson earned the hatred and opprobrium of most Republicans, particularly those members of Lincoln’s party in Congress who initially hoped that he ...

Literature

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

October 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...

Migration

In the Shadow of Auschwitz

Reflections on America’s Asylum Policies in the Age of Trump

October 25, 2019 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

This odd combination of events sparked a number of thoughts which I offer now after further reflection. I will not enter into the discussion of whether the detention facilities to which children have been confined in the U.S. are or are not similar to concentration camps; nor am I arguing ...

Capitalism

Conflicting Claims

Race, Capitalism & the Current Crisis: Conundrums for Those Who Envisage a Socialist Future

October 22, 2019 • by Michael C. Dawson

The multiple capitalist crises the U.S. faces today are a result both of the inherent contradictions found within a capitalist social order, and from frictions and contradictions arising out of its articulation with two other systems of domination -- those of patriarchy and white supremacy. These crises have generated extreme ...

The Left

Keeping the Left Alive: Michael Walzer’s Political Action Reissued

If any book can help left-wing activists figure out how not to burn out, this is probably it

October 22, 2019 • by Geoffrey Kurtz

That hopeful and interesting work is the subject of Walzer’s book Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics. Originally published in the spring of 1971 and reissued this year by New York Review Books, Political Action is in a genre by itself. Like an organizing manual but more thoughtful and suggestive, like ...

Sex & Gender

The Many-handed Hunger of Transsexuality

On T. Fleischmann

October 21, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

What do we do with what’s left over, with what is in excess of bare life, if we have it? Denounce it as privilege, perhaps. I’m not a particularly moral person. Sure, that’s bad. I’m not very moralistic either. That’s probably good. With what’s left over in my life, I’d ...

Public Health

Flash Count Diary

Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

October 17, 2019 • by Darcey Steinke

1 Night on Fire 2:11 a.m.: I wake, heart thwacking, as heat flows up from my stomach, courses behind my face, and radiates out through the top of my head. I watch a lamp with a pink shade drift out of my neighbor’s window and hover over my darkened backyard. An hour ...

North America

Trump and the Shifting Landscape of Political Conflict

What Minneapolis Teaches Us

October 16, 2019 • by Joe Lowndes

Trump's rally at the Target Center in Minneapolis on October 9th -- particularly his attack on the Somali community -- highlights important elements of what is likely to be his campaign strategy for 2020. We are all too familiar with Trump’s xenophobia and race-baiting. But much has changed on the ground ...

Uncategorized

Senior Citizens as “Silver Surfers”

& Other Fantasies about Working Longer

October 15, 2019 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

The new “working-longer consensus” is reminiscent of the deeply flawed and now largely-discredited “Washington Consensus” that crystallized around aid to developing countries in the 1980s. Both are based on the demands of neo-liberal policy makers, not the needs of working people. The Economist recently endorsed the findings of the 2019 OECD report “Working ...

Capitalism

The Clerk Problem

An excerpt from Accounting for Capitalism: The World The Clerk Made

October 14, 2019 • by Michael Zakim

The age abounded in loafers. There were literary loafers, Yankee loafers, French loafers, genteel loafers, common loafers, and country loafers— the latter observed by Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Brighton Cattle Fair “wait[ing] for some friend to invite them to drink.” Nevertheless, loaferism was most essentially a metropolitan phenomenon, strolling the ...

Uncategorized

I Ain’t Gonna Work on Merritt’s Farm No More

A brief history of central California’s forgotten empire

October 11, 2019 • by Matthew Ford

In early 1949 as the shift away from wartime production slowed economic growth in the South, my great-grandparents (Glen and Lucille) began looking for new opportunities. Glen’s wartime jobs at a military training field and an ammunition factory in Oakridge Tennessee dried up, and he went back to tenant farming ...

Essays

In Her Own Way, She Lived as a Philosopher

Jurgen Habermas Remembers Agnes Heller

The Impeachers

The Trial Of Andrew Johnson And The Dream Of A Just Nation

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

In the Shadow of Auschwitz

Reflections on America’s Asylum Policies in the Age of Trump

Conflicting Claims

Race, Capitalism & the Current Crisis: Conundrums for Those Who Envisage a Socialist Future

Keeping the Left Alive: Michael Walzer’s Political Action Reissued

If any book can help left-wing activists figure out how not to burn out, this is probably it

The Many-handed Hunger of Transsexuality

On T. Fleischmann

Flash Count Diary

Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

Trump and the Shifting Landscape of Political Conflict

What Minneapolis Teaches Us

Senior Citizens as “Silver Surfers”

& Other Fantasies about Working Longer

The Clerk Problem

An excerpt from Accounting for Capitalism: The World The Clerk Made

I Ain’t Gonna Work on Merritt’s Farm No More

A brief history of central California’s forgotten empire

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