From Publisher Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

The Banality of Evil and the Death of the Author

Recent posts on Public Seminar and labor unrest at The New School lend themselves to reflection on social interaction, and raise questions of individual recognition and responsibility.

Top reads

Claire Potter
5.16.18

Elections Turn on Policy, Not Public Relations

To answer the question as to how Democrats lost in 2016 in counties they had won four years prior, they must face the difficult fact that working class voters no longer believed in their policies. In the coming elections, Democrats must put policies on the table that speak to those challenges.

Allison Grimaldi-Donahue 
5.16.18

Poetry’s Intrinsic Ontology of Change

Nietzsche writes that human creative power lies in our ability to “recreate broken molds.” Certainly, Allison Grimaldi-Donahue contends, this holds true for the translation of poetry, which is always a repetition with a twist.

Brian Connolly
5.17.18

The Death of the Author

Why are historians so caught up in being cited for their work? After all they aren’t “some heroic individual recovering and resurrecting lost people.” Rather, historians ought to regard themselves as the organ through which knowledge, new and old, is filtered.

Sharon Ringel 
5.18.18

The Future of Our Past

At first glance, the digital archive appears to facilitate the democratization of knowledge. But its construction requires curation and “human interference which is, in fact, very similar to the processes involved in creating the physical repository.”

PUBLIC SEMINAR: open, critical, challenging, confronting the pressing issues of the day and fundamental problems of the human condition, expanding the project of The New School for Social Research