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Essays Illustration by Mafe Izaguirre

DIVING INTO THE STREAM by Daniel S. Benveniste

I relocated from San Francisco to Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1999, just one month after Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency. He presented himself as a socialist intent on helping the underclasses and ending corruption, and I was ready to sign…

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Essays Photo by Duncan C

TRUMP’S WALL by Sheldon Bach

In the Anglo-American world, men are brought up to value a body image that is hard, flat, and impermeable, more like a wall, whereas women are taught to value or at least be content with one that might be softer…

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Essays Man portrait in black and white diffuse image

STUPIDITY by Jared Russell

In explicating the thought of Socrates, Nietzsche wrote that philosophy was an effort “to harm stupidity” (The Gay Science, §328). According to Nietzsche, humanism teaches us that it is our egotism that is to blame for our misery. Socrates taught…

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Essays Concrete column with a fissure in the edge

THE FISSURE by Michael A. Diamond

There is a psychic fissure in America’s exceedingly fragile democratic body politic. In the face of political tribalism and an awakened and reinvigorated far-right white nationalist movement in America, civil servants (nonelected career public servants) from the Departments of State,…

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Essays Black photocopy collage by Mafe Izaguirre

AFTER THE WAR by Iris Fodor

When I was a child in the Bronx in the 1940s, whenever a plan for the future was proposed, it would be followed by the phrase “after the war.” My parents would say, “after the war” my father would quit…

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Essays Almond Tree Branches on Blue Sky

AFTERWARD by Ofra Bloch

There was no way I could have known when I went to Germany to interview the descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust for my film Afterward that this journey would take the form of a personal analysis. On the surface,…

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Essays Man under the shadow in a black background with a white aura

READING RACISM DEEPLY by Daniel Rosengart

If the usual formula is that the negative affects hide in positive speech, overtly racist discourse flips the polarity, but the possibility that a racist discourse might hide a forbidden love, sexuality, or attachment is all too often ignored in…

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Essays A joung man standing on a yellow and red background edited with a motion effect

NEOLIBERAL GASLIGHTING by Scott Graybow

The term “analytic action” assumes new complexity when we use it to enhance meaningful discourse about our unsettling and turbulent political reality. It opens doors to the possibility of kindling a deeper connection to parts of our psychoanalytic heritage, such…

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Essays Photograph of a wave of black water

TOXIC DRIP by Charles Rizzuto

Think back, if you will, to the halcyon days of the Reagan regime, with the Great Communicator’s elaborate economic agenda he called “trickle-down economics.” The alleged benefits never trickled down to most of us, and we know now that the…

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Essays © Mafe Izaguirre Digital numbers in color red showing as a giant clock on east river counting down days left in president trump's term

STILL HERE by William W. Harris

Well, it has been a little over a year, and he’s still here. I have stopped binge-watching TV, but he is still infecting my life. How can I ignore the Greenland saga or tune out the furious tears in response…

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Essays Black hands in a prayer

SO I LISTEN by Abraham Velazquez, Jr.

I remember my first time being at The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis) and participating in their writing program, The Lyrical Circle. It was held in the space where we would be sharing and creating art for years to come. We met…

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Essays Blurred photograph of a person from the back with a red sweater

ON EDGE by Michael A. Diamond

All of us work at the boundary. In fact, we work and live at multiple boundaries. We belong to numerous systems and relational networks. The idea of boundary is a metaphor for where and when we come into contact with…

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