Welfare Archives - Public Seminar

Podcast

Hit Them in the Pocketbook

May 8, 2023 • by Claire Potter

This book describes a part of the African American civil rights movement that many people don’t know—perhaps because it was run, and the battles were fought, by Black women who saw their activism as an extension of their commitment as mothers....

Democracy

Donald Trump Politicized the Federal Bureaucracy: The Next President Needs to Reverse That

How to rebuild our broken government

October 21, 2020 • by Yevgeny Shrago and Mariama Eversley

In an effort to mitigate the political damage from failing to contain the virus and manage its corollary crises, the White House recently mandated that the Department of Agriculture include a signed letter from Donald Trump inside food boxes, claiming credit for the federal program providing food to families in ...

Donald Trump Politicized the Federal Bureaucracy: The Next President Needs to Reverse That

Capitalism

As New York City Rebuilds, Business Can Be Part of the Solution

Higher taxes are necessary, but who will have the political courage to make it happen?

October 1, 2020 • by Kim Phillips-Fein

Early in September, more than 160 executives from companies like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, the white-shoe corporate law firm Skadden Arps, and a host of real estate developers and financial firms sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio. They expressed their fear that “deteriorating conditions” in the city might slow ...

As New York City Rebuilds, Business Can Be Part of the Solution

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

Gender

Looking for the Original “Welfare Queen”

An Interview With Josh Levin

March 17, 2020 • by Josh Levin and Lauren Browne

The following interview, with Josh Levin the 2020 award winner for biography, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In his critically acclaimed book The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, Josh Levin, national editor at Slate, introduces us to Linda Taylor, ...

Looking for the Original “Welfare Queen”

Feature

The Unfolding Welfare Crisis in the UK

Will a system designed for universal care become a universal catastrophe?

December 4, 2018 • by Christian Garland

Chris Gold of Shepton Beauchamp, Somerset -- one of the “test” areas in which Universal Credit is in operation -- was found to have died of natural causes. Despite suffering a stroke in 2015, Gold had lost his Employment Support Allowance after being declared “fit for work,” and then in ...