Politics Archives - Public Seminar

What Does the State Want Us to See?

On the cancelled livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution

October 30, 2026 • by Safiyah Rochelle

When US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proposed livestreaming the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major and psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, he extended an invitation to the public: log on to your preferred device and watch the state kill. The invitation expanded the ...

Europe & Central Asia

Will Hungary’s Liberation From Orbán Lead to Lasting Democratization?

Even as it ousts the old guard, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party must exercise the power of a supermajority with caution

October 28, 2026 • by Imre Szijarto

This April, the celebrations in Budapest evoked images of the fall of the Berlin Wall: hundreds of thousands poured into the streets, teens climbed on top of buildings, and twenty-somethings in baggy thrifted jeans chanted old slogans of the 1956 revolution against Stalinist tyranny. After 16 years of gradual entrenchment, ...

Will Hungary’s Liberation From Orbán Lead to Lasting Democratization?

Art & Design

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

On the first modern media event in fin-de-siècle France

October 15, 2026 • by Karine Macarez

In October 1899, Parisians could purchase a large color lithograph depicting a grotesque human-pig hybrid, complete with spectacles and a curly tail, wielding a paintbrush and smearing a map of France with this brown “caca international”—“international poo." The picture was a caricature of the novelist Émile Zola, or “Le roi ...

Before Social Media, There Were Postcards

Film & Performing Arts

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

The documentary turns Israeli soldiers’ testimony into an indictment of a system whose victims have been telling its story for years

October 13, 2026 • by Mitchell Abidor

When NAZA, the new documentary on the genocide in Gaza directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival it was reported that it set a festival record for the longest standing ovation ever at 24.5 minutes. When I saw the ...

NAZA Gives A Name to the Machinery of Killing

Europe & Central Asia

The Magic Bridge

The mythic promise of the world’s longest suspension bridge

September 29, 2026 • by Giuliano Beniamino Fleri

On June 7, 1955, the Italian national newspaper La Stampa announced—with the pompous optimism typical of the postwar years—that “work on the bridge over the Strait of Messina will begin in one month.” The bridge would stretch across the Mediterranean to connect Messina, the port city at the northeastern corner ...

Activism

Art for the Front Lines

An interview with activist-artist Susan Simensky Bietila

September 25, 2026 • by Julie Allan and Susan Simensky Bietila

A large heron flew over the shore of Lake Michigan at dusk, with cardboard wings spanning sixteen feet—the width of the four activists who held up the puppet’s structural rods. Its wings flapped up and down in the wind. In 2016, demonstrators carried the heron as they marched to celebrate ...

Activism

Waiting for Revolution in Bangladesh

On the fortnight before the July 2024 uprising

September 21, 2026 • by Ned Wontner

Fourteen days before Bangladesh’s 2024 revolution, I arrived in Dhaka. The plane, half-empty, held Bangladeshi construction workers returning from Malaysia, one South Korean businessman, and myself. I had no real plans beyond spending a couple of weeks with activists and political scientists in Dhaka. They were friends, colleagues, and strangers ...

Interviews

The Cultural Marxism Bogeyman

An interview with author A. J. A. Woods on their new book about the Right’s favorite conspiracy theory

July 27, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum and A. J. A. Woods

A specter is haunting the West—the specter of Cultural Marxism. Or at least that’s what many conservative operatives would like us to think. From military theorist William S. Lind to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prominent right-wingers deploy “Cultural Marxism” as a catch-all for the forces behind our reputed decline: feminism, ...

North America

Judging Presidents

The hidden logic of C-SPAN’s expert survey

June 18, 2026 • by Larry Schwartz

C-SPAN’s Presidential Historians Survey has become one of the most widely cited efforts to evaluate presidential performance—shaping how figures such as Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush are understood alongside their predecessors. Its rankings circulate in classrooms, media coverage, and public debate, offering what appears to be a ...

Politics

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

June 2, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum

I have a friend, let’s call him SJ, who is passionate about social justice. He majored in political science and keeps apace with all the latest goings on domestically and abroad. He parlays this knowledge into a dozen or so savvy Instagram stories per day on topics ranging from, to ...

History

The Waning of the American Illusion

And the virtues of democratic idealism

May 19, 2026 • by Sylvia Taschka

Was Ronald Reagan’s famous image of America as a “shining city on a hill” truly just an illusion, a Fata Morgana of the United States as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and moral leadership, a trick played on the world’s collective mind? In a podcast aired on January 14, 2026, Tucker ...

Politics

Marco Rubio in Dante’s Inferno

His orazion picciola at Munich, and the fate of Republican oratory post-Trump

May 18, 2026 • by Daniel DiMassa

It hasn’t escaped the commentariat that, among other things, the appeal of Trumpism is rhetorical. “I love the way he talks,” a supporter told Vanity Fair in 2020. “I understand him more than any other president.” Iterations of the same remark have become a refrain over the last decade. There ...