Trump, Impeachment, and the Question of Democratic Legitimacy

To allow Trump to continue to act as if he has legitimacy is simply to continue to legitimate him and his party

Trump declares boldly and angrily that he is President because he won the election; that as President he is entitled to disparage long-standing governmental norms, break the law, declare national emergencies on a whim, assault the civil rights and liberties of immigrants, minorities, and women, and treat his critics, in ...
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Ghosts, Trauma and Travel Fever in Psychoanalysis

A reflection on working with the transgenerational transmission of trauma

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis, published by the Relational Perspectives Book Series, delves into the overwhelming feelings related to mourning. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, it features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways ...
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Ghosts, Trauma and Travel Fever in Psychoanalysis

#OnArrive — But Where Are We?

Unpacking the electoral performance of Europe’s nationalist right

The last time citizens of European Union member states displayed enthusiasm for the European Parliamentary elections was in 1979 when turnout was 61.9 percent. 1979 was the year that the elections began and the year that the Union consisted of only nine members. In the five Parliamentary elections that have ...
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This is a Sample Essay

With a Subtitle

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but ...
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In Praise of Clicktivism

On the Ethics and Efficacy of Digital Activism

In April 2019 thirty-thousand workers from Stop & Shop, a New England-based grocery chain, went on strike to protest cuts to their wages and benefits. After eleven days of direct action, representatives from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union reached a settlement with the billion-dollar chain on April ...
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In Praise of Clicktivism

Trans Bodies/Trans Identities

Arlene Stein and Tey Meadow in dialogue

Tey Meadow is the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), an ethnographic and interview based study of the first generation of families actively facilitating transgender identities in youth. Arlene Stein is the author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity (Vintage 2019), which ...
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Trans Bodies/Trans Identities

Corpus Nullius: How Europe Recast the Migrant Body

Narratives of the migrant-refugee crisis reflect the interests they serve

After a record number of refugees arrived in Europe in 2015 following the Syrian collapse, Europe’s reaction provided the conditions for an even more fundamental change. As the fences went up at each boundary within a previously borderless Schengen Europe -- almost as an act of self-reproach following Angela Merkel’s acceptance ...
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Corpus Nullius: How Europe Recast the Migrant Body

A Secret Invasion 

The University in Exile and conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories offer alternative explanations for shocking historical events and sweeping cultural changes. They simplify complex socio-political factors and processes into seductive narratives of Good versus Evil. They are the opium of those who believe that they are on the wrong side of history, yet imagine that God is on ...
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A Secret Invasion 

The Anxiety Industry

At the limits of anxious consumerism

Anxiety -- that chronic, widespread uncertainty proliferating out of the insecurities that exemplify modern life -- has become the lodestone of 21st century consumer capitalism. From fidget spinners, gravity blankets, CBD oils, air fresheners and skincare products to white noise machines, salt lamps, calming diffusers and the countless meditation apps inundating our ...
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The Anxiety Industry

On These Truths

History can’t save the world. It can’t even save democracy. But it can offer hope.

Jill Lepore's response was originally published on May 9 2019. The day I sat down to write this essay I got an email from a man in South Carolina. He’d been studying for his U.S. citizenship exam and he’d decided to read my book, These Truths: A History of The United States, ...
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The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...
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The Violence of Abstraction

National Identities, Popular Histories

Nations are built on both ideals and ugly contradictions – historians have an obligation to both

This essay was originally published on May 8 2019. I want to begin with a confession, since it’s always better to admit the embarrassing thing that everybody knows: twentieth century United States historians like me are raised with minimal expectations that become glaringly apparent when we read a book that begins ...
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