Fascists in Slovak Politics

Waiting for a new chance in times of the COVID-19 crisis?

Marian Kotleba, a former IT teacher, is infamous for his open hatred of the Roma minority, Jews, immigrants and the LGBTIQ+ community. He denies the Holocaust and admires the World War Two fascist Slovak State and its president Jozef Tiso, who was hanged in 1947 as a war criminal. Kotleba ...
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This is Not a Temporary Crisis

Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with Tomasz Sawczuk

Tomasz Sawczuk: The United States faces now a dangerous pandemic, a deep economic crisis, and massive social protests, after a policeman killed George Floyd. On top of that, Donald Trump fuels further division and conflict into the American politics. To begin on a general note, how do you make political ...
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Biden Versus Trump: Whose Story of America Will Americans Choose?

“That’s not who we are” — or is it?

As Plato suggested in The Republic, politics is driven more by stories than facts. As different as they are in all other regards, America’s last two presidents both won wildly improbable electoral victories while telling completely contradictory stories about their country. Barack Obama made his own hopeful story a symbol of ...
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Biden Versus Trump: Whose Story of America Will Americans Choose?

Psychology and Fashion

Psychology is the scientific study of behavior. It is applicable, and valuable, in every context in which people are involved. Psychologists are analysts, trained to synthesize information and conduct analyses to provide deeper understanding of behavior in order to be able to predict it—and where desirable, to change it for ...
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Psychology and Fashion

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

What we really need to do to address the economic impact of systemic racism in the United States

When Dinah Washington recorded “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” in 1959, the blues diva managed to imbue the Tin Pan Alley lyrics with a kind of haunted hopefulness, the same kind of soulful yearning that would reappear a few years later in Sam Cooke’s monumental ode to the civil ...
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Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

Wages Against Essential Work

Our undervaluation of traditionally female work is coming home to roost

The streets around Highland Hospital, a few blocks from my house in Rochester, New York, are lined with signage “thanking” and “supporting” the “essential” workers who labor there. Many signs are hand-made, propped on porches or taped to light poles; others are mass-produced, like campaign signs, anchored into residential lawns. ...
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Wages Against Essential Work

Trump’s Story of America

Whistling “Dixie” through the graveyards

By the time of Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech on July 3 of this year, his targets had shifted, slightly but significantly. Now America faced threats from “angry mobs” trying to “tear down statues of our Founders” and “unleash a wave of violent crime” in the service of a “new far-left ...
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Trump’s Story of America

How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

The rich have been successfully chipping away at Americans’ trust in government for decades

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent ...
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How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

Turkey’s Forged Success Story

Re-opening without closing down?

Erdoğan of Turkey was already equipped with extensive powers to exhibit his one-man-show. Even though the two years long post-putsch state of emergency formally ended in July 2018, most of the emergency regulations were codified in a way that essentially kept the country in a perpetual state of emergency well ...
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