Politics Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part VI

“By the flood of his dysregulation”

February 26, 2026 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART VI, APRES MOI LE DELUGE Happy is the idiotin the privacy of dreamssequestered from the busynessof business, at home under cloudswith every peripatetic steplike a dog licking every handsniffing every crotchbefore fondling his ownfloating on a raft of melting ice Unhappy is the tyrantin the publicity of powercaged by ...

Podcast

The Ostriches: Part V

“the padded paws in tactical gloves”

February 20, 2026 • by Val Vinokur

THE OSTRICHES: PART V, FORT SNELLING, MN Our hair is full of the sand of cliché,but the ostrich does not hide her head.When the big cats and jackals dancethrough the dry grass, the ostrich liesflat on the horizon, a plumed moundon the definitive curve of the earth.The brown feathers hide among ...

Sports

Feminism, Sports, and Football in North Korea

Women’s football is one of the very few areas in which North Korea can display excellence to international audiences

February 3, 2026 • by Jung Woo Lee

While North Korea's political doctrine displays a revisionist character that combines nationalism with communism, traditional socialist feminism still influences its gender policy. The key tenet of socialist feminism includes the emancipation of women from economic dependency on their male counterparts and their liberation from confinement to household duties (Mojab 2015). ...

Feminism, Sports, and Football in North Korea

Philosophy

Revolutionary Ideals and the Temptations of Tyranny

A public conversation about philosophy, politics, and the fateful tropism of sincere political idealists of all types

January 29, 2026 • by Dan Edelstein, Gwenda-lin Grewal, James Miller and James Romm

The following conversation was first presented as a public panel on October 9, 2025, as part of the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges at the New School for Social Research. James Miller: As Dan Edelstein has shown in his important new book, The Revolution to Come, for most of ...

Revolutionary Ideals and the Temptations of Tyranny

Politics

Switzerland, January 22

After the thugs

January 22, 2026 • by Adam Tooze

Walking past the pavilion proclaiming “Freedom 250.” The blank metal of the decaled window frames, evokes nothing of the sort. Faded wraps in red, white, and blue remind one of a gambling parlor in some bedraggled third-tier pedestrian mall. Or of the sort of images that enthusiastic men glue to cars and motorbikes. Strip ...

North America

One Battle After Another

With ICE in Minneapolis: An eyewitness account

January 21, 2026 • by Emily Condon

On Tuesday morning, January 13, I was driving home after dropping my 9-year-old son off at school. There were ICE vehicles everywhere, I was surrounded by them on Park Ave. After a block or two of this, I parked and got out of my car. I saw that there were many ...

Politics

“Things Happen”

On one’s sense of impending doom

January 20, 2026 • by Arthur Goldhammer

Americans have long enjoyed a robust and righteous sense of impunity. No matter how badly our government blundered, we nevertheless clung confidently to the notion that we would always land on our feet. It has been said (allegedly by Bismarck, but there is little evidence to support the attribution) that “there ...

Interviews

Finding the Equator

A conversation on the failures of Western media after Gaza and a new cosmopolitan publication that answers the call for change

December 17, 2025 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Suzy Hansen

Suzy Hansen is an author and journalist whose work examines the blind spots of American liberalism and the failures of Western journalism. She is one of the founding editors of Equator, a new online publication created in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, to address censorship in liberal media coverage. ...

Film

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, La Grazia

An interview with the Italian film director on ordinariness, doubt, and jealousy at the heart of his new film

December 8, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Paolo Sorrentino

Editorial note: This interview contains spoilers. Paolo Sorrentino’s films are grand affairs, with elaborate camerawork and stunning settings underscored by memorable music. The plots match the grandeur of the mise-en-scène. In his new film, La Grazia, the purely cinematic elements of the film remain grand—and at times knowingly bizarre, like the ...

Paolo Sorrentino on his new movie, <em>La Grazia</em>

Education

The Words We Learn to Fear

How authoritarianism begins with the policing of language

December 4, 2025 • by Maria B. Olujic

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: ...

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

Genocide

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

December 2, 2025 • by Ayotunde Giwa

On October 28, 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher. Satellite images show what Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified as bodies scattered across the hospital grounds. Videos filmed by RSF fighters themselves show militia walking through ransacked wards, stepping over piles of dead ...