Essays Archive - Page 9 of 131

In Search of a Room of My Own

In New York City’s cutthroat housing market, a student finds refuge in an all-women building

February 8, 2023 • by Yasmin Arquiza

As more and more women enter higher education, however, the need for female-friendly spaces shows that places like Webster are more relevant than ever....

Psyche

Understanding Myself Wasn’t All It Was Cracked Up to Be

A psychiatric diagnosis can be a relief—until it gives you other problems to solve

February 7, 2023 • by Josephine Houman

If my ADHD had been diagnosed earlier, my psychiatrist explained, the medication would have worked....

Understanding Myself Wasn’t All It Was Cracked Up to Be

Activism

Beyond Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Binaries

An excerpt of Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights

February 6, 2023 • by Camilla Fitzsimons and Sinéad Kennedy

Abortion became illegal in Ireland in 1861 as part of the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s Offences Against the Person Act. But while abortion might not have been talked about much in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was happening. ...

Interviews

“A Terrible Time”

A conversation with Camilla Fitzsimons about the ongoing global fight for abortion rights

February 6, 2023 • by Amalie Thieden and Camilla Fitzsimons

When I was campaigning to repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2018, many older people were very, very, very welcoming of the referendum; they had somebody in their family who had had to travel abroad to get an abortion, or they had experienced or known women who felt they’d had too ...

Democracy

American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Liberal institutions, abolition democracy, and civic virtue

February 1, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Juliet Hooker, William Milberg, James Miller and Deva Woodly

If we think about the way that liberalism anchors democracy, it largely relies on rights and institutional design. Just as a descriptive matter, it’s the case that the institutions that have been designed and the regime of rights that has been conceived, including the regime of human rights that has ...

Democracy

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

The democratic project is both unfinished and unstable

January 31, 2023 • by James Miller

Even though the post-war consensus over the meaning and value of specifically liberal democratic institutions seems more fragile than ever—polls show that trust in government experts and elected representatives has rarely been lower—democracy as furious dissent flourishes as rarely before, in vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites ...

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

Democracy

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

How John Dewey’s notion of social intelligence can remake contemporary politics

January 31, 2023 • by Deva Woodly

For Dewey, the notion of social intelligence is that human beings are able to shape and change the world through the understandings that they gain from the fund of human knowledge that exists: old ideas combined and related through the world as we experience it, and latched onto something new. ...

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

Democracy

Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

On a universal right to migration and the ideal of “composite nationality”

January 30, 2023 • by Juliet Hooker

Douglass’s conception of multiracial democracy envisioned the political coexistence on egalitarian terms of individuals of “all races and creeds” as fellow citizens. He called for a “composite nationality” anchored in the idea of a universal human right to migration and the political legacy of the Americas as a multiracial continent. ...

Democracy

Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy and Its Culture

The dangers of a new tyranny of a minority in our time

January 30, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

On the central problems of race, gender and sexuality, and class, Tocqueville is not the best of guides in considering today’s crisis of democracy in America. Nonetheless, I still think that Tocqueville has much to offer in understanding America and the present crisis in our democracy....

Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy and Its Culture

Literature

Bard, Kinetic

An excerpt from the preface of Anne Waldman’s new nonfiction book

January 25, 2023 • by Anne Waldman

Poetry has always braved shifting and terrifying frequencies. There is no time in human history without poetry. Poets often go into exile in fraught times....

Interviews

I Think of It as a Diary

An interview with Anne Waldman about her book Bard, Kinetic and a political life well-lived

January 25, 2023 • by Lindsey Scharold and Anne Waldman

Lindsey Scharold spoke with Waldman about where these themes overlap: where others intersect with memoir, where the spiritual aligns with the political, and where theory and practice meet....

Reviews

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

Is it possible to decode the mystery of the world’s most haunting children’s book?

January 24, 2023 • by Alla Anatsko

What The Morgan gets right is showing us how The Little Prince took shape from day one...

Essays

In Search of a Room of My Own

In New York City’s cutthroat housing market, a student finds refuge in an all-women building

Understanding Myself Wasn’t All It Was Cracked Up to Be

A psychiatric diagnosis can be a relief—until it gives you other problems to solve

Beyond Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Binaries

An excerpt of Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights

“A Terrible Time”

A conversation with Camilla Fitzsimons about the ongoing global fight for abortion rights

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

The democratic project is both unfinished and unstable

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

How John Dewey’s notion of social intelligence can remake contemporary politics

Frederick Douglass on Multiracial Democracy

On a universal right to migration and the ideal of “composite nationality”

Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy and Its Culture

The dangers of a new tyranny of a minority in our time

Bard, Kinetic

An excerpt from the preface of Anne Waldman’s new nonfiction book

I Think of It as a Diary

An interview with Anne Waldman about her book Bard, Kinetic and a political life well-lived

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

Is it possible to decode the mystery of the world’s most haunting children’s book?

Newsletter

Connect With Us