Essays Archive - Page 34 of 131

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

In this interview with Public Seminar, the memoirist discusses complex mother/daughter dynamics, enthusiastic consent, and finding clarity through the “privacy of the page.”

October 20, 2021 • by Melissa Febos and Madeleine Janz

New School alum and bestselling author Melissa Febos sat down (virtually) with Public Seminar intern Madeleine Janz to discuss writing about those you love most, complicated “almost” traumas, and the inherited shame of female adolescence. Febos’s newest book, an essay collection entitled Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), was on The New School’s Alumni Bookshelf this year and is available for purchase here. Madeleine Janz [MJ]: To ...

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

Economy

“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

Too often they bring storage facilities and upscale college housing, but not economic prosperity

October 20, 2021 • by Arlene Martínez

On SW Taylor Street in Portland, Oregon, there is a shiny new glass-and-steel building with a fireplace in its grand lobby. Developers got approval for the posh retail and office project in 2016 and, a year later, a local gas utility inked a 20-year lease to house its headquarters there. As it ...

“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

Politics

Did Judith Butler Really Say TERFs Are Fascists?

No—Butler did something far more useful. They asked us to think more deeply about body politics

October 19, 2021 • by Hannah Leffingwell

The latest Judith Butler story goes like this: Butler, a renowned philosopher and queer theory bigwig, did an interview with Jules Gleeson of The Guardian. The interview was published on September 7, 2021: social media instantly exploded over Butler's assertion that so-called “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (otherwise known by their opponents ...

Did Judith Butler Really Say TERFs Are Fascists?

Literature

Savage Tongues

Light, language, landscape, and the political context of intimate violence

October 15, 2021 • by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

Halfway to the apartment, I decided to cut through the blind alleys of the old city, to climb up through its shaded streets and stout houses, their windows gazing at one another coyly, to the Plaza de los Naranjos. I remembered an old woman who ran a shop in the ...

Literature

Confronting Buried Sexual Trauma

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi talks with Alexandra Kleeman with about her new novel, Savage Tongues

October 15, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

On the publication of her new novel, Savage Tongues (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi sat down with New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman to discuss the rhythms of language, the influence of light, shadow, and landscape on prose, and the historical and political context of intimate violence. ...

Politics

Democratizing Movements v. Constitutional Politics

An introduction to this week’s issue on the future of constitutionalism and democracy

October 13, 2021 • by James Miller

The idea for a symposium in Public Seminar on “Constitutional Politics” grows out of a two-day conference on Liberalism & Democracy: Past, Present, Prospects. I organized these conversations at the New School in February 2019, in collaboration with Helena Rosenblatt, a historian at City University of New York Graduate Center. One of the key participants was Aziz Rana of Cornell University, ...

Constitutional Politics

The Merits—and Risks—of Constitutional Politics

Further comments on the prospects for democratizing modern forms of government

October 13, 2021 • by Aziz Rana and Sanford Levinson

Sanford Levinson: The participants in this symposium all join in desiring significant constitutional reform, focusing on the general rubric of “democratizing” what is now almost universally recognized to be an undemocratic political structure established by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. As in 1787, when the mission was to supplant the “imbecilic” government ...

Constitutional Politics

The Decline and Fall of American Exceptionalism

Why the perception of the Constitution will inevitably be a central part of an extended process of political self-reckoning

October 13, 2021 • by Anthony Barnett

It’s a fact that the United States is no longer the world’s pre-eminent superpower—a change that cannot help but transform America’s political conception of itself. Its decline in relative power will of course take time. The dollar still rules, the military reach of the States is unequalled. But the US has ...

The Decline and Fall of American Exceptionalism

Constitutional Politics

Chile Tries to Write a New Constitution

Progressives in the nation’s Constitutional Convention see an opportunity for creating a more just society

October 13, 2021 • by Jennifer M. Piscopo

In a national referendum held on October 25, 2020, nearly 80 percent of Chileans agreed that the country should have a new constitution, to be written at a convention attended by specially elected delegates. The vote was the climactic result of weeks of paralyzing demonstrations in 2019, as students, feminists, workers, Indigenous peoples, pensioners, and thousands of others had taken to the streets to protest economic and social injustice. With resounding majorities choosing change, Chileans ...

Constitutional Politics

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

October 12, 2021 • by Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn

Aziz Rana’s genealogy of American constitutional veneration overturns the conventional wisdom, not merely about the chronology, but also about the reasons for this worshipful attitude towards a document drafted in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, his forthcoming book, Rise of the Constitution, is politically explosive: for it ...

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Constitutional Politics

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Many American states have not only frequently amended their constitutions, but, at least as importantly, have replaced existing constitutions with presumably better, updated, ones

October 12, 2021 • by Sanford Levinson

“Veneration” is a term that James Madison used in Federalist 49, to express the kind of great respect he hoped the new Constitution he had helped write would command in the debate over ratification then raging in America. Yet as Aziz Rana reminds us, many of America’s most notable political ...

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Constitutional Politics

Why Americans Worship the Constitution

October 11, 2021 • by Aziz Rana

In the last two centuries, 220 countries have appeared on the global stage and, between them, they have produced a remarkable 900 written constitutions. The sheer numbers are telling: For the most part, societies treat their constitutions instrumentally. When these legal-political orders break down or social upheaval brings new elites and alliances ...

Essays

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

In this interview with Public Seminar, the memoirist discusses complex mother/daughter dynamics, enthusiastic consent, and finding clarity through the “privacy of the page.”

“Opportunity Zones” Are a Game Only the Rich Can Play

Too often they bring storage facilities and upscale college housing, but not economic prosperity

Did Judith Butler Really Say TERFs Are Fascists?

No—Butler did something far more useful. They asked us to think more deeply about body politics

Savage Tongues

Light, language, landscape, and the political context of intimate violence

Confronting Buried Sexual Trauma

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi talks with Alexandra Kleeman with about her new novel, Savage Tongues

Democratizing Movements v. Constitutional Politics

An introduction to this week’s issue on the future of constitutionalism and democracy

The Merits—and Risks—of Constitutional Politics

Further comments on the prospects for democratizing modern forms of government

The Decline and Fall of American Exceptionalism

Why the perception of the Constitution will inevitably be a central part of an extended process of political self-reckoning

Chile Tries to Write a New Constitution

Progressives in the nation’s Constitutional Convention see an opportunity for creating a more just society

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Many American states have not only frequently amended their constitutions, but, at least as importantly, have replaced existing constitutions with presumably better, updated, ones

Why Americans Worship the Constitution

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