Don’t Cry for Her — Elizabeth Warren!

Democratic voters have shown themselves increasingly likely to vote for women, and Warren will be back in 2024

The commentariat -- almost to a woman -- wrung its collective hands when Warren dropped out of the race (where were they when she needed them?). Writing for The Guardian, Moira Donegan lamented that “As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had ...
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Don’t Cry for Her — Elizabeth Warren!

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...
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When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam         or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...
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“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

Warren Supporters Have Vowed to Persist

But are the flaws in the Sanders campaign significant enough that backing Joe Biden’s “establishment” bid is the best political choice for them?

David Plouffe, who was on the News Hour last week talking about his new book and a radically pruned Democratic presidential candidate field, says there isn't. I guess Plouffe (pronounced "Pluff" — I have been calling him "Ploofe" for years) should know. If there were an establishment, he would be ...
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Warren Supporters Have Vowed to Persist

If Sanders Wants to Lead the Democratic Party…

Then he should do more to build bridges and stop attacking “The Democratic Establishment”

At the same time, Bernie Sanders clearly has assumed front-runner status. It is no surprise that this has his supporters jubilant, and has his opponents concerned and even frightened. There surely are some Democratic donors and operatives who absolutely hate the thought of a Sanders nomination -- whether for ideological or tactical reasons -- ...
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If Sanders Wants to Lead the Democratic Party…

Fat Activism

Past Present Podcast, Episode 218

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: In recent years, “body positivity” has become a buzzword. Natalia cited The Fat Studies Reader and this Campus Reform article about more extreme forms of fat liberation. Niki referred to this Bitch Media article about the connections between fat and queer liberation. We previously discussed plus-size models on Episode ...
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Hong Kong on the Brink

The irony of the UK, one of the world's great democracies, belatedly handing over a colonized people from one distant ruler to another, in Beijing, was not lost on the people living nearly 2,000km south of China's capital. It is hard to say how genuine Margaret Thatcher's claimed optimism at the ...
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Hong Kong on the Brink

The Speech that Mike Bloomberg Should Have Given Last Week

How the former Mayor might redefine the importance of an outsider candidacy — by leaving the race, and supporting a candidate who can win

But at the moment, he is actually harming both. He is hurting Democrats by blunting the message of all the candidates other than Bernie Sanders. And he is hurting the country by making it less likely that the Democrats will nominate a person who will be able to defeat Donald Trump. Yet he ...
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The Speech that Mike Bloomberg Should Have Given Last Week

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...
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Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

Fifty Years of Social Research

Arien Mack reflects on her half-century stewardship of The New School’s flagship quarterly journal

James Miller [JM]: Let’s start at the beginning. What year did you come to The New School for Social Research? Arien Mack [AM]: 1966. I had just gotten my Ph.D. JM: At that time, how much did you know about the legacy, the traditions of The New School? Did you know anything at all ...
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Fifty Years of Social Research

Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

What Bernie Sanders Might Learn from Elizabeth Warren

I have been struck today by how much of the argument I saw in the last few days before the Nevada caucuses, much of which was swirling around disagreements between the Bernie campaign and the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, was based on a common misunderstanding of the dynamics of ...
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Health Care & the Dangers of Demanding the Impossible

Lao-tzu, Plato, and Parasite

What’s up with that Scholar’s Stone?

Parasite depicts the struggling Kim family, living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, desperately seeking sources of income to afford the very basics to sustain their humble lives. In a portentous scene early in the film, the older child of the family, Ki-Woo, is visited by his wealthy college friend, Min, ...
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Lao-tzu, Plato, and <em>Parasite</em>