Essays Archive - Page 86 of 131

Gender as Proselytism

Romania’s education law hits a new low

June 16, 2020 • by Maria Bucur

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States stated through a 6-3 majority decision that gender and sex are not the same thing. To discriminate against sex as the body parts one has is not the same as discriminating against a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation. How did we get ...

Capitalism

Don’t Sell Your Mind

June 16, 2020 • by Janet Capron

A few years ago, an exciting new publishing house named Unnamed Press published my memoir about street life in the seventies, including the time I spent hooking in various whorehouses and massage parlors around town. The book was well received, and I went on a small tour, where my readings ...

History

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

June 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Alvin Johnson is the leading man in the history of The New School. He saved it from financial failure again and again and again; he attracted intellectuals to its faculty, most auspiciously those fleeing fascist Europe in the 1930 and 40s and he persuaded artists such as Thomas Hart Benton ...

From the Editors

From Reaction to Reflection

We know that racism is structural–what vision for change will prevail?

June 12, 2020 • by Claire Potter

In 1962, James Baldwin described what it was like to make the turn from childhood to adulthood as a black man. His male peers, he wrote in the New Yorker, seemed lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was `the man’—the white ...

Activism

Reject Reform

Why “No Justice, No Peace; Prosecute Police” hopes for too little

June 11, 2020 • by Micol Seigel

I’m writing as the nation ignites with protests against police brutality -- again. This time, the loss is a Minnesota man named George Floyd. As I join in the protests of Floyd’s tragic death, I dare to hope that this time, they might spark real and meaningful change. My research ...

North America

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

How best to address America’s current crises

June 11, 2020 • by Desmond King and Rogers M. Smith

The United States is in the midst of three national crises: a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a civil rights crisis provoked by racist police brutality and structural racism. Each demands national responses and leadership. Designed to prevent centralized tyranny, the American federal system has always had trouble marshaling a ...

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

Activism

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

The legacies and lessons of Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s Resistance, and Black Lives Matter

June 11, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

In his call with governors on June 1, President Donald Trump said the current protests are “like a movement, and it’s a movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse. This is like Occupy Wall Street.” Astonishingly, like that broken clock that is correct twice a ...

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

Sex & Gender

Why Do Men Like Pornography?

And why radical feminism helps us find a path to real intimacy

June 11, 2020 • by Robert Jensen

Not all men use pornography, of course, and some women do as well. But people in the pornography industry know that the majority of their customers are men. Because of this, most pornography reflects what pornographers believe men will watch—and come back to watch again. This, in turn, influences the ...

Psyche

Fear of Death Amid a Pandemic

Divergent psychoanalytic approaches

June 11, 2020 • by Howard Steele

Throughout the modern period, philosophers and psychologists have debated whether anxiety and fear are fundamental human feelings. For those treating patients using psychoanalytic methods, I have long pondered two divergent psychoanalytic approaches to two specific kinds of fear: (1) the fear of annihilation and (2) the fear of loss of ...

Activism

The New Abolitionists

And what they can learn from their predecessors

June 11, 2020 • by Sidney Tarrow

On the same weekend when hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of countless American cities, I saw a yard sign reading “Black Lives Matter!” in Genoa, New York -- which came as a real shock. Genoa is an overwhelmingly Republican town of 1,900 residents, with a tiny black ...

Race

When the Penis Is Property

Why we can’t talk about the sexuality of enslaved African American men

June 11, 2020 • by Kevin Mumford

In Joseph Lavallée's novel, The Negro Equalled By Few Europeans, an enslaved African man named Itanoko describes being raped by a white slaver named Urban. The white man was "struck with my comeliness,” Itanoko says, which "made him violate, what is most sacred among men.’” According to Thomas Foster’s Rethinking ...

Theory & Practice

Sentencing the Present: An Archive of a Crisis

Critical conversations in a time of crisis

June 11, 2020 • by Lindsay Atnip, Benjamin Bernard, Audrey Borowski, Jonathon Catlin, Andrew Cole, Ayça Çubukçu, Benjamin P. Davis, Jodi Dean, Stephanie Degooyer, Christina Heatherton, Shannon Hoff, Bonnie Honig, Stephen Hopgood, Siddhant Issar, Joy James, Martin Jay, Susan Kang, Mark Kingwell, David Lloyd, Vincent Lloyd, Mac Loftin, John Lysaker, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Lissa McCullough, Zein Murib, Yasemin Sari, Mohammad Salama, Sarah Schulman, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Martin Shuster, Dara Z. Strolovitch, Enzo Traverso, Moira Weigel and Rocío Zambrana

A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In a spirit of both open inquiry and political advocacy, and inspired by the response of readers to our own “Theses for Theory in ...

Essays

Gender as Proselytism

Romania’s education law hits a new low

Don’t Sell Your Mind

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

From Reaction to Reflection

We know that racism is structural–what vision for change will prevail?

Reject Reform

Why “No Justice, No Peace; Prosecute Police” hopes for too little

What Would Good National Leadership Look Like Now?

How best to address America’s current crises

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

The legacies and lessons of Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s Resistance, and Black Lives Matter

Why Do Men Like Pornography?

And why radical feminism helps us find a path to real intimacy

Fear of Death Amid a Pandemic

Divergent psychoanalytic approaches

The New Abolitionists

And what they can learn from their predecessors

When the Penis Is Property

Why we can’t talk about the sexuality of enslaved African American men

Sentencing the Present: An Archive of a Crisis

Critical conversations in a time of crisis

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