Co-Executive Editor, Public Seminar and Professor of History, The New School for Social Research

Interviews

The University Ate My Neighborhood

A conversation with urbanist and cultural historian Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

February 15, 2022 • by Davarian L. Baldwin and Claire Potter

Claire Potter sat down with urbanist Davarian L. Baldwin to discuss his new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), to hash out what these relationships do to reshape our cities....

Interviews

Walking This Road Together

A conversation with historian Linda Hirshman about interracial alliances, social movements, and her new book, The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation

February 9, 2022 • by Linda Hirshman and Claire Potter

Linda Hirshman is a lawyer and cultural historian whose book The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation, is making its debut this week. Linda, a historian of social movements who is also the author of books about the feminist and gay rights ...

Feminism

No, Joan Didion Wasn’t a Feminist

January 26, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Joan Didion and feminism never had much of a relationship when she was alive. And yet, shortly before Christmas, as news of Didion’s death from Parkinson’s disease spread, prominent feminists claimed her as one of their own. Although Didion “wrote scathing commentary on feminism,” novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted, “she was (of ...

Interviews

Why Privatization Is Worse Than You Know

An argument for more, and better, government

January 7, 2022 • by Donald Cohen and Claire Potter

Many people think privatization only means contracting for a prison or selling off a water system, but my definition is broader: private control of, and power over, public goods. By public goods, I mean things that we all depend on, essential services. So that includes prisons, but it also includes ...

Why Privatization Is Worse Than You Know

Education

Sincerely, A Very Famous Man

Or, why academics should dispense with letters of recommendation entirely

December 20, 2021 • by Claire Potter

The letter of recommendation also shows us, in microcosm, how elite institutions—universities, foundations, humanities centers, think tanks—gate-keep for each other....

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

Politics

Could We Learn to Live Somewhere Between “Never Again” and “Thoughts and Prayers?”

The culture war over guns must end for school shootings to end

December 3, 2021 • by Claire Potter

You know the United States is edging back to a post-Covid normal when a distraught kid takes his father’s 9 mm Sig Sauer, purchased on Black Friday, to his Michigan high school and opens fire. It is the most recent of 53 school shootings this year that have killed 17 people and wounded ...

Could We Learn to Live Somewhere Between “Never Again” and “Thoughts and Prayers?”

Politics

What Kyle Rittenhouse Teaches Us

Whatever the Kenosha jury ultimately decides, the American right’s embrace of citizen violence, and the effects of their propaganda on boys, is far more troubling

November 16, 2021 • by Claire Potter

I watched Kyle Rittenhouse’s testimony last week, and as he crumpled up in tears, I thought: what a sad, stupid story. For anyone who has missed the background to the Rittenhouse trial: this is the guy who, at 17, decided to go to Kenosha, Wisconsin, from his home in Antioch, Illinois, ...

Technology

Don’t Kill Facebook: Reform It

November 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

In 2018, as we were all still digesting how disinformation campaigns upended the 2016 election, technologist and internet critic Jaron Lanier published a manifesto. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Henry Holt) introduced readers to the methods by which platforms like Facebook and Twitter not only capture and ...

Politics

Never-Trumpers Keep Insisting that Reaganism Was Not Demagoguery—It Was

The “normal” GOP set the stage for the MAGA movement, and neoconservatives could help restore our democracy by telling the truth about what they did

September 29, 2021 • by Claire Potter

The conservative flavor of the week for liberals is Robert Kagan’s Washington Post opinion piece from September 21, 2021. It recounts, in apocalyptic terms, what everyone who cares about democracy in both parties worries about: that J6 was just the beginning; that the continuing lies and chaos that Trump and ...

Never-Trumpers Keep Insisting that Reaganism Was Not Demagoguery—It Was

Feminism

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

A conversation with McKenzie Wark, one of our most dazzling contemporary theorists, about what we can learn from one of America’s most dazzling postmodern writers

September 17, 2021 • by Claire Potter and McKenzie Wark

Claire Potter: Let’s begin where the book begins—your relationship with Kathy Acker. McKenzie Wark: I should start by saying that the relationship was incredibly brief. She had a lot of them. It is the kind of thing she did—fall massively in love with somebody. It would last a few weeks, as it did ...

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

Feminism

Why Does the Texas Legislature Believe That Embryos Have a Heartbeat?

Because fake science is part of the American conservative tradition

September 8, 2021 • by Claire Potter

____ The Texas statute that went into effect last week is one of many similar anti-abortion laws that have either recently cleared state legislatures or will clear them in the coming months. Using the weapon of a civil suit that can be filed by any private citizen, the law seeks to ...