Essays Archive - Page 127 of 131

Border Tragedies

A Tempest Tossed Essay by Alex Aleinikoff on Trump border policies.

January 20, 2019 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

The death of 7 year old Jakelin Caal while in Border Patrol custody is a tragedy, and it is sadly emblematic of Trump Administration border policies that have devastated families, undermined U.S. asylum laws and betrayed traditional American values. Alex Aleinikoff, Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility ...

Democracy

From “Islands of Democracy” to “Islands of Totalitarianism”

Notes on my conversation with Daniel Dayan about the disturbing events in France and the United States, and beyond

January 18, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

We met in our favorite Parisian workplace, La Caféothèque, and then caught up with each other elsewhere over a lunch and a dinner. We’re working on our ongoing collaborative writing project, now influenced by recent events in France and the United States. We disussed papers he is developing on a theory ...

From “Islands of Democracy” to “Islands of Totalitarianism”

Feature

The Biggest Dog You’ve Ever Seen

Interview with National Book Award Winner Sigrid Nunez

January 8, 2019 • by Sigrid Nunez and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In November 2018, the prestigious National Book Award for fiction went to The Friend, a novel about grief, writing, friendship, and a Great Dane named Apollo. The author of The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018) is Sigrid Nunez, a long-time faculty member of the New School Creative Writing Program. Nunez has published seven other books, ...

Feature

What We Know About Parsons School of Design’s Namesake

The story behind Frank Alvah Parsons, the man who made art and design accessible to New Yorkers

January 4, 2019 • by Molly Rottman

A hundred and fifty miles from Parsons’ campus in New York City is a small town in the foothills of the Pioneer Valley called Chester. With a population of 1,380, Chester’s only claim to fame was emery, a mineral used in the nineteenth century for grinding metal (and later finger ...

What We Know About Parsons School of Design’s Namesake

Democracy

When Is a Lie a Lie?

Trump, Journalism, and Objectivity

January 1, 2019 • by Ian Olasov

Public Seminar is pleased to announce that Ian Olosov's essay, originally printed at Public Seminar on March 13 2017, was one of four essays to win of the American Philosophical Association 2018 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest. Congratulations Ian! It is neither fake news, nor really even new news, that the press is struggling ...

Feature

JFK’s Queer White House

What we can learn about a straight President by looking at the gay men in his orbit

December 13, 2018 • by Claire Potter

President John F. Kennedy has become infamous for his vivid, and some might say almost compulsive, heterosexual affairs. But straight men can have a gay side, and JFK’s life was filled with prominent gay men, friendships which open the door to other histories. At least one of these intimates, Kirk ...

Feature

We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds

A response to Jen Manion

December 3, 2018 • by Dean Spade

Jen Manion’s thoughtful and provocative essay, "The Performance of Transgender Inclusion: The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary," proposes that having participants in group spaces identify their pronouns to each other causes more harm than good. I disagree. For almost two decades, I have been working to address the harm ...

Feature

The Performance of Transgender Inclusion

The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary

November 27, 2018 • by Jen Manion

The first time someone asked me my pronoun was about a decade ago at a meeting of directors of LGBTQ centers from colleges and universities in the Northeast. Sitting around a table for our first session, we were invited to share our names, pronouns, and the school we represented. I ...

Feature

Smart Media Is a Pain

As machine intelligence advances, we encounter the painful limits of our social intelligence

November 22, 2018 • by Benjamin Peters

Public media discourse has been fairly agonizing. All sides seem beset by mobs of malicious morons: waves of fake news pounding against their believers, crafty hackers seeding chains of disinformation, the trollish alt-right cooptation of identity politics, and even a populous turnout at the US midterm elections that, no matter your political leanings, likely ...

Democracy

Not from the Left, Nor from the Center – But From Below

By mobilizing at the grassroots, Democrats successfully outflanked the GOP by crafting resistance into a coherent agenda

November 20, 2018 • by Sidney Tarrow

But these were only the most visible -- and the most national -- expressions of a wave of movements. Much of the energy that produced the Democratic victories of November 2018 rose up beneath the radar of the national press. As Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol wrote in a New Republic article ...

Not from the Left, Nor from the Center – But From Below

Democracy

The Soviet Roots of Democratic Crisis in Latvia

As the country falls under populist rule is it a change — or an old story?

November 20, 2018 • by Maija Spurina

A New York Times article by Andrew Higgins paints a troubling picture of Latvia falling under populist rule. Higgins' concern is based on the results of the recent elections that makes possible a coalition between what he calls a "pro-Russian" and anti-establishment parties. Although his summary of the election results is accurate, ...

The Soviet Roots of Democratic Crisis in Latvia

Democracy

Politics, Pessimism, and Populism

We have lost the sense of the possible that social democracy injected into postwar liberal democracy

November 15, 2018 • by Sheri Berman

The rise of right-wing populism is probably the most pressing problem facing Europe today. Many analysts, including myself, have linked the rise of populism to the decline of the social democratic or center-left. Many traditional social democratic voters now vote populist; social democracy’s embrace of a “kinder, gentler” neoliberalism opened a policy “space” ...

Essays

Border Tragedies

A Tempest Tossed Essay by Alex Aleinikoff on Trump border policies.

From “Islands of Democracy” to “Islands of Totalitarianism”

Notes on my conversation with Daniel Dayan about the disturbing events in France and the United States, and beyond

The Biggest Dog You’ve Ever Seen

Interview with National Book Award Winner Sigrid Nunez

What We Know About Parsons School of Design’s Namesake

The story behind Frank Alvah Parsons, the man who made art and design accessible to New Yorkers

When Is a Lie a Lie?

Trump, Journalism, and Objectivity

JFK’s Queer White House

What we can learn about a straight President by looking at the gay men in his orbit

We Still Need Pronoun Go-Rounds

A response to Jen Manion

The Performance of Transgender Inclusion

The pronoun go-round and the new gender binary

Smart Media Is a Pain

As machine intelligence advances, we encounter the painful limits of our social intelligence

Not from the Left, Nor from the Center – But From Below

By mobilizing at the grassroots, Democrats successfully outflanked the GOP by crafting resistance into a coherent agenda

The Soviet Roots of Democratic Crisis in Latvia

As the country falls under populist rule is it a change — or an old story?

Politics, Pessimism, and Populism

We have lost the sense of the possible that social democracy injected into postwar liberal democracy

Newsletter

Connect With Us