The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man

Exploring the twisted personalities calling the shots in a culture where mean is celebrated

Mark Lipton – with rich experience as an adviser to major corporations, start-ups, government agencies, and not-for-profits – integrates years of psychological research to uncover what drives men in powerful positions to do dastardly things in order to fulfill their “visions”. Mean Men: The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man reveals the ...
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Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...
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The Return of the “Forgotten Man”

Refurbishing symbols of the Gilded Age

Yet there is another sense in which we, in America, have been treading upon well-worn ground. Though many called the campaign and outcome of the 2016 election unprecedented, its roots lie, at least partly, in economic and social conditions which are by no means new. In his 2014 book, Capital ...
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A Woman’s Work

A Library of One’s Own

Read the news with a suffragist of 1913. Women’s rights advocates scanning the society page of the Atlanta Constitution on the morning of 4 June had a bevy of personas to peruse. There was the “Woman Shopper” gliding through a downy Eden of department stores: “Your presence, your influence and the wholesome atmosphere that ...
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What Happens Now?

Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

It’s a year after the American Election Day that shook the world, and a new book that seeks to explain the disaster of Donald Trump’s victory drops every few weeks. We political historians are scrambling to keep up. Last month, Hillary Clinton’s What Happened? hit the stands. How does it feel to ...
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The Antidote to “Too Much Niebuhr”?

A.J. Muste and the Anti-American Political Tradition

The conflict between radical pacifists and other Protestants went deeper than the question of the United States’ role in the world; it was also about national identity, race, and historical memory. To Muste, when policymakers posited the United States as the representative of democratic civilization, they effectively erased its history ...
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An Unreasonable Standard

Reconsidering law, race and police violence

Wilcox escaped the Coburns, but 30 minutes later, was confronted by another police officer, Jesse Kidder. Wilcox left his vehicle and ran at Kidder. “Shoot me, shoot me,” Wilcox said again and again, still running forward. “I don’t want to shoot you, man,” yelled Kidder as he backed up. Wilcox ...
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Good News

On the American elections, Public Seminar and civility and subversion

I am feeling better this week. The election results were heartening, from top to bottom, from the high profile governor races in Virginia and New Jersey to the defeat of a most right wing county executive in Westchester, New York (close to home and very significant for me and my ...
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What We Really Learned in Charlottesville

Finding a Way Forward

By the standards of today’s whiplash news cycles, the coverage was in-depth and lasting. The media did not move on from the issue so much as it overexerted itself and wearily stumbled on to the Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Trump’s DACA repeal. When the dust settled, nearly everyone agreed ...
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Did Hamilton Write Too Much For His Own Good?

The publication history of the Federalist

You probably know that line about the Federalist from the Act One finale of Hamilton, “Non-Stop,” in which Aaron Burr repeatedly asks Hamilton, “how do you write like you’re running out of time?” In the musical, his indefatigable pen is treated as a virtue (and yes, I have at times listened to ...
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#BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

What active citizenship can look like and what it can accomplish

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison 1787    “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.” – Ella Baker 1964[1] Social movements are often regarded as potentially hazardous disruptions, uprisings that interfere with the normal mechanisms of politics -- insurgencies that must be either repressed or swiftly re-incorporated into the regular legislative process. In ...
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