Reckoning with The New School’s Legacies

A comprehensive view reveals entrenched inequities

_____ What The New School was, is, and could be, has long been contested, often by those who care the most about it. The institution has a convoluted and sometimes contradictory past. It is an amalgamation of parts and histories, a place of stops and starts, sometimes an alternative to traditional ...
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Reckoning with The New School’s Legacies

A Few Remarks on Outing

In August and September 2020 a lively discussion about another case of “outing” of a public figure, i.e. disclosing a person's sexual orientation against their will, entered Polish public debate. This time, Jan Kanthak, a MP from the conservative party “United Poland” (Solidarna Polska), was outed by Michał Kowalówka, a local ...
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A Few Remarks on Outing

Good and Evil

An excerpt from On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt

_____ Goodness exists, even in the darkest of moments. It is worth remembering this—that the violence and brutality of the war did not only bring out the worst in people. The darkness also inspired goodness, bravery, and responsibility. There are countless examples of people who, often at great risk to themselves ...
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Good and Evil

John Stuart Mill and the Successful Failure of Liberalism

A political philosopher for our troubled times

The scholarly world has recently gone in for grand narratives of decline. The similarly-titled How Democracies Die and How Democracy Ends share a transatlantic frisson of horror at illiberal democracy, while offering different diagnoses of the problem. The erosion of liberal democratic norms, exacerbated by parties’ failure to choose centrist candidates, or liberal democracy's ...
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John Stuart Mill and the Successful Failure of Liberalism

Bridging the Gap: When Students from Two Very Different Campuses Find a Path to Understanding Each Other

Two reputations, two narratives, one goal: to listen, learn and value each other

"From our vantage point as Deans of Student Affairs (at two very different small liberal arts institutions), the process towards healing the divides in our nation could only be achieved through finding our collective humanity, not through vanquishing our alleged enemies. We wanted to keep the professed sentiments of President ...
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Bridging the Gap: When Students from Two Very Different Campuses Find a Path to Understanding Each Other

What Yellen and Hamilton Comparisons Omit

Women’s progress is not guaranteed

When President Joseph Biden nominated Janet Yellen to become the first female Secretary of the United States Treasury, references to Alexander Hamilton began immediately. Invoking Lin Manuel-Miranda’s hit musical, Biden quipped that Yellen, like the first Treasury secretary, deserved her own production. In response, American Public Media’s Marketplace commissioned hip-hop ...
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What Yellen and Hamilton Comparisons Omit

Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

If we don’t hang together, we will surely hang separately

Our effort to create and nourish a “world-wide committee of democratic correspondence” began long before the coronavirus laid waste to our world. And as a world-wide network, our efforts have always involved a strong online component. For the web affords our far-flung group many opportunities for the sharing of ideas ...
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Confronting the World Wide Threat of Right Wing Authoritarianism

Break Up the Tech Monopoly

No corporation should be so big or systemically important that it can credibly threaten to cut an entire nation off from the news

Australian leaders want Google to pay news outlets for articles the tech giant serves up to users. In response, Google threatened to pull its search engine from the entire country. Not just news, but democracy is at stake. Google’s threat sounds absurd. But it actually happened. And Google wasn’t alone: Facebook also ...
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Break Up the Tech Monopoly

We’ve Never Been Global

How local meanings mattered in 1900 and still matter now

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the ...
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We’ve Never Been Global

Bernie’s Mittens

This, we imagine, is how Bernie really is (or at least looks) no matter where he is, and this image of reality strikes us and amuses us like a common dandelion growing amidst a swathe of bougainvillea

The image of Bernie Sanders at the 2021 presidential inauguration already seems to have launched more ships than Helen of Troy. Senator Sanders, or more casually chic, “Bernie,” appeared wearing repurposed Fair Isle mittens made by a Vermont school teacher, Jen Ellis, and a very practical coat from the Vermont-based ...
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Bernie’s Mittens

Larry King

Past Present Podcast, Episode 265

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: TV and radio legend, Larry King, died last week at the age of 87. We discussed some of the retrospective pieces King’s sixty-year career produced, like this 2010 feature in the New York Times, and this 1988 article in the ...
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