Cancel Culture Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

Is Corporate America Rebuking the Republican Party?

Georgia’s voting rights laws are forcing unlikely alliances between the Democrats and Big Business

April 6, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ The Republican outrage over Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game out of Georgia after the passage of the state’s new voter suppression law reveals a bigger crisis in American democracy: the mechanics of our current system do not reflect the will of the majority. Consumer-driven corporate America is increasingly throwing ...

Is Corporate America Rebuking the Republican Party?

Past Present

The Controversy over Dr. Seuss

Past Present Podcast, Episode 270

March 9, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Theodore Geisel’s estate has removed six of his Dr. Seuss books from circulation, causing ire among conservatives citing it as an example of “cancel culture.” Natalia referred to writer Michael Harriot’s Twitter thread, this 1945 Frank Sinatra short film, “The ...

Activism

On Our Revolutionary Moment

Putting today’s revolt against institutional racism into historical context

July 22, 2020 • by James Traub

Protestors, who had been staging increasingly violent strikes, had assailed City College, CUNY’s flagship school, located in the middle of Harlem, as a racist institution that used academic standards to deny admission to all but a handful of Black and Puerto Rican students. They demanded that CUNY abandon those standards ...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part VIII

On the sharp edge of fragility

July 21, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Follow your own feet uphill, fix / your gaze on the undeliverable missives / flying back to their return address...

Democracy

Why the Harper’s Letter Got It Wrong

The most serious threats to protest and open debate come not from the left or the right but from the state and powerful political institutions

July 16, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer

So I took a new job in a new city and began again. I have been thinking about my decision to speak up, and its costs, in light of The Letter. You know the one: the open letter in Harper’s magazine that praises the “needed reckoning” of the past few months ...

Higher Ed

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege

July 16, 2020 • by Joshua T. Katz

In Congress, on July 4, 1776, came the “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Signed by 56 men, many of whom were considered national heroes just a few minutes ago, it opens with a long and elegant sentence whose first words every American child knows, or used ...

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor

Power and Crisis

Why I Didn’t Sign the Harper’s Letter

Meeting our Black Lives Matters moment — and what the letter gets right

July 16, 2020 • by Robert Boyers

The now famous Harper's letter signed by 153 intellectuals has understandably stirred furious debate. Though I declined to sign it when asked, I disagreed with nothing in the letter, and I knew that I would continue to have misgivings about my decision. After all, the letter is informed by a concern ...

Politics

Fox News Accidentally Reveals the Horrible Truth About Republicans

An attempt to advance the Republican party line goes awry

July 9, 2020 • by John Stoehr

Brian Kilmeade is co-host of Fox & Friends, the president’s favorite weekday morning show. Kilmeade is, well -- he’s not that bright. To be sure, he’s very good at advancing the party line. Sometimes, though, he gets mixed up. Wednesday morning, he tried saying something bad about the Democrats but ...