Two of my favorite historians, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, are teaching a course, starting in mid-September, at the New York City DSA Academy—yes, an actual socialist school for the left!—that I think will be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog. It’s called “Red New York: A History of the Left in America’s Most Radical City.” Seems pretty timely and relevant, no? There are just five classes, and having listened to both Josh and Steve for years, I can tell you that there are not two people who know more about the NYC and the left and are better pedagogues than these two! Seems like a real treat. You can sign up here.
It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists. For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have […]
Since my review of Sven Beckert’s book on capitalism went live (and, truth be told, a few days before that), I’ve been engaged in a back and forth, sometimes bitchy, sometimes friendly, with various critics—of me, of Beckert, of capitalism, of Marxism, of Dylan Riley, of Robert Brenner. You can find many of these exchanges on my Facebook page. Others have sent me screenshots from Twitter and other social media platforms I’m not on. One of the steady drumbeats in these conversations is privilege. My privilege as a senior scholar with social media followers, Beckert’s privilege as a Harvard professor, Riley’s privilege as a male Marxist, and on and on. But there’s a kind of privilege that never gets mentioned […]
Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, doesn’t do introspection. So he tells David Senra—whose great point of pride and life achievement, according to Senra’s website and statement to Andreessen, is that “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten [that’s 410] biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs”—in a conversation that’s been making the rounds online. Many commentators seem intent on challenging Andreeseen’s claim that he doesn’t do introspection. It is, after all, a bit of a performative contradiction, since the mere affirmation, when asked if he has any levels of introspection, “Zero, as little as possible,” would seem to require at least some introspection and stock-taking. Otherwise, how would he know? But I’ll believe Andresseen. […]
One of the more delightful innovations of the Obama era was the requirement that every full-time employee—or taxpayer, I don’t know—has to provide proof of “health insurance offering and coverage” when filing their taxes. It’s called a 1095-C form. The employer provides it to you, the employee, and you file it with your taxes. The 1095-C form is yet one more way that Americans show to the world our pitch-perfect sense of how to waste time while pretending to do something good. Instead of having the government provide everyone with healthcare or health insurance, our leaders and experts come up with some sort of nudge that somehow or another is supposed to get us somehow closer to some group of […]
On Thursday, my daughter, who’s a high school senior, won first place for the best paper in the National History Day competition for all of New York City. The title of her paper is “Drop Dead University: The Fight for Free Education at the City University of New York.” She worked hard on it, dug deep into the municipal archives about the 1975 Fiscal Crisis and the decision to end free tuition at CUNY, read widely in the secondary literature, and, though I’m obviously not objective, did a good job. Now she goes on to the New York State competition, which will be at the end of April. Aside from proud-parent bragging, I’m posting about this tonight because I just […]
In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach does something that usually drives me insane. Introducing the story of Odysseus’ scar from Homer’s Odyssey, Auerbach writes, “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when….” Six pages later, when he introduces the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Auerbach writes, “the story itself begins: everyone knows it….” When contemporary academics do this kind of thing, make this gesture of knowingness, it drives me crazy, as I said. I want to cry out, no, everyone does not know it, readers will not remember! But in Auerbach’s case, I don’t mind it. Why not? Because, despite his saying […]
The literary critic George Steiner often mused, almost perversely, on the fact that some of the most wondrous works of twentieth-century literature were produced under conditions of extreme censorship. He especially liked to remark upon the Soviet experience and the literature that came out of it, suggesting that great literature emerged not from societies of freedom but from those of domination. Reading the below list of topics that cannot be discussed in Florida classrooms, I wonder if we might not be in for some decades of intense intellectual ferment and creativity. Imagine all the possibilities for scholars and writers and teachers and students, as they struggle to work their way around the censor. Remember the old theory about the Bukharin […]
Four ICE agents walk into a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, are served a meal, and return hours later to arrest three of its workers, walking home, in front of a Lutheran church. I can’t remember where it was that I read this, but it was less than 24 hours ago, in one of those big classic histories of the ancient world, about how hospitality cultures arise in opposition to predatory and piratical practices. (One of the genuine advantages and most welcome reforms of Athens’s Delian League was the suppression of piracy.) In seafaring communities, in particular, hospitality becomes the marker of those who are potential friends as against those who are definitive enemies. With ICE, we seem to have pioneered […]
If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer. Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him. Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule: No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and […]
Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and beloved by midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So we now have, in the twenty-first century, at the invocation for a Muslim political leader, a Muslim religious leader repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family that had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century. That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no? If you stayed […]
On July 15, at a congressional hearing, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik subjected CUNY’s chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, to a humiliating round of questions about the alleged views of the CUNY faculty and staff. The chancellor, unfortunately, did little to defend the people at CUNY who work to make the institution what it is. Instead, he ritually intoned the need to fight antisemitism. When asked about specific people and institutions at CUNY, he deflected, feigned ignorance, or threw his employees under the bus. I particularly remember one moment of the exchange between Stefanik and the chancellor (start at 4:45). Stefanik: Are you familiar with CUNY CLEAR? This is the clinical arm of CUNY School of Law. Rodríguez: CUNY CLEAR. I’m not […]
I just read an oped in an Ivy League undergraduate newspaper arguing that it is a matter of basic justice for the university to pay for and provide students with access to the most up-to-date AI platforms. Duke University, the oped argues, is already paying for and providing its students with this platform. If this Ivy League university not does follow the example of Duke, Duke students will have an “unfair advantage” over this university’s students. The university must make this technology available to ensure that its students are competing on a “level playing field.” This article, I should say, may be the best reason I’ve yet found for why universities should ban AI. Until you’ve been forced to sweat […]
Reading this morning’s report on a meeting of the Northwestern faculty with its interim president Henry Bienen, I was struck by the language Bienen uses to set out his stance toward Trump: I want to do a deal with the federal government. I don’t want to get into suits with the federal government. Set aside the substance of what he’s saying. I’m more startled by the effluence of such Trumpian language—not just “deal” but “I want to do a deal”—from the mouth of a university president. Not, “I think we might come to a prudent arrangement with the federal government.” Not “I think a path of compromise is always more productive than one of confrontation.” Not “the law and the […]
Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over to the Trump administration to help with the federal government’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus. Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components more clearly. Since February, Trump’s Department of Education has been investigating universities, including Berkeley and other UC campuses, for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In March, the Justice Department announced a separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses. In July, a House congressional committee called three university leaders to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the summoned was the chancellor of […]
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Categories
Education, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Brooklyn College, CUNY, Ellen Schrecker, James Milliken, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, Zohran Mamdani
Here are some findings from the last two days of the New York Times. Let’s put these pieces together. New Yorkers stand with Palestine. New Yorkers think that Mamdani has the best position of any of the mayoral candidates on Palestine. Jewish New Yorkers stand with Mamdani. Younger (and educated) New Yorkers overwhelmingly stand with Mamdani. Many of those younger New Yorkers are students, in the process of being educated. Some of those students attend CUNY. This past weekend, Mamdani went to Brooklyn College, where he said that students and staff and faculty at CUNY should not be punished for their activism on behalf of Palestine. Brooklyn College has fired four instructors for their activism on Palestine and is hauling […]
News from the world that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are making for us.
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Categories
Economies, Education, Jews, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right
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Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Eric Adams, John Deere, Lisa Cook, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Northwestern, Zohran Mamdani
The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth. In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
According to Gothamist, Columbia has disciplined more than 70 students for activism around Palestine. More than 2/3 of those students have been suspended or expelled. In return, Columbia is trying to negotiate about one billion dollars in research grants that Trump has frozen. That’s roughly $14.3 million per every punished student. I guess that’s a good deal for Columbia, huh? Not so good for education and freedom, though.
Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American. Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context—and […]
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Categories
Education, Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, Violence
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Tags Edmund Burke, Eric Adams, Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, Peter Beinart, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zohran Mamdani
In 2008 or thereabouts, society launched an experiment: What happens when grownups give smart phones and related technologies to kids? Less than twenty years, and a rampant teenage mental health crisis, later, we have the results, and a majority of states are banning or limiting phones in classrooms. In 2020, we launched an experiment, because we had no other choice, using online technologies for teaching students of all ages, down to kindergarten and pre-k, and dramatically reducing or eliminating in-person instruction and contact entirely. Most of us now back in the classroom, in real life, have a pretty good sense of how that experiment, however necessary it was, turned out. Now, in 2025, the New York Times reports today: OpenAI, […]
Why do academics and journalists and writers need to announce their professional good news or that of a friend or colleague or department with these cringey “amid the dark times, a bit of light” introductions? If you think these are dark times, the fact that a journal just accepted your article—or a publisher signed a contract for your co-edited anthology or your friend is now the dean or a favorite writer just got hired by a magazine—well, you can’t really believe any of this illuminates the darkness. Can’t you simply tell us your good news and trust that we’ll be happy for you without our having to run it through the cash register of the universe to see whether and […]
I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still… But, still, you have to laugh. Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked. Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course. NYU strongly denounces the choice […]
Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]