Verticals

An army revolt against vanishing communist forces brought back Constitutional order, halting the march toward totalitarianism, and was celebrated in Brazilian streets like a football victory. “Brazil,” The New York Times believed in 1964, “is a desperately sick country. The present struggle is simply to see who is going to get possession of the unhappy patient. Whoever the victors, a long period of economic and political convalescence is in order.” The truth, however, was very different.

Brazil was then a rapidly …

I recently filled out a “Health Assessment” form for my employer and insurance company.

I was queried not only about my diet, exercise, and existing medical conditions. I was also asked about how happy I was at work, if I approved of my boss’s performance, whether I worried about money, and if I had received any recognition from my community in the past year. The computer — the computer! …

This post, adapted from a lecture in the team-taught course “Rethinking Capitalism” at The New School for Social Research and first published last year, is being reposted today to provide critical insight into today’s headlines. Slavery was central to the development of the American political economy. Ott reviews the recent scholarship that shows how it came to be that Black lives haven’t mattered. -J.G.

Racialized chattel slaves were the …

Prior to his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty turned his attention to religious belief and its place in the public sphere. Rorty had long been presenting himself as the “village atheist” in the domains both of academic philosophy and public intellectualism: he viewed religious belief as the most pervasive form of false metaphysical comfort, and as a political “conversation stopper” that is ineluctably at odds with the sort of foundationless liberal democracy he championed. But late in his career …

I stand before you with more questions and contradictions than answers. I have chosen to speak of growing up “under different skies” because that was my destiny. What I don’t know is whether such a biographical accident sheds a very different light on growing up or whether it is more of the same with just greater geographical movement than in most young lives.

When I wrote a quarter of a century ago my intellectual autobiography …

As I write, the plug is being pulled on the steady-state.

Violence and tragedy take revenge on humanity through routinization. Sooner or later we become immune.

But is there a reverse process, such as Freud writes about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the nightmare recurs so as to provide the anxiety that would have …

Economic globalization is much in the news these days, most recently as Congress debated President Obama’s proposal for a “free trade” agreement with the nations of the Pacific Rim. My impression is that few mental health professionals keep up with the details of economic globalization and its impact on culture and mental health. In this article I will briefly present two ways in which economic globalization has a huge and largely unrecognized impact on …

On June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges added the United States to a growing list of nations that provide equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. In an impassioned majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, Obergefell overturned remaining state bans on marriage for same-sex couples and required all states to recognize marriages legally performed elsewhere. (I am among the historians of marriage whose amici curiae brief …

I very much liked Sinéad Kennedy’s piece on the yes to same-sex marriage in the Irish referendum. I share her sense that the 62% yes vote on May 22 was an impressive progressive victory. At the same time, I strongly agree with her statement, “As a political objective, same-sex marriage sits comfortable with prevailing neoliberal ideology.” I would like to add a few comments …

On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision guaranteeing the right of same-sex couples to marry in every state in the nation. This landmark case concludes just as another marriage is crumbling: the marriage between anti-gay politics and fiscal conservatism.

Since the 1980s, Americans have grown accustomed to a national-level political discourse juxtaposing the buzzwords free markets, small government, and family values ...