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Dec 4, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Joseph T. Feldblum |Sammy Feldblum
William Deresiewicz gives himself broad leeway in his recent Chronicle Review essay on how out-of-touch academics tried, and failed, to swallow America. Too broad. He begins by conflating academe with progressivism generally, reading a set of conservative electoral victories as rebukes of the culture of higher education.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Geraldo L. Cadava |Rick Perlstein |Sammy Feldblum
Between the two of us, we’ve thought about American political history for a long time. It strikes us, if in different ways, that we’re living through a potential political realignment quite unlike the ones we’ve seen in earlier periods—and for which realignment itself might be too mild a word. Not too long ago, many believed that an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic electorate would deliver victory after victory for Democrats.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Sammy Feldblum
Is it 1968 all over again for the Democrats? This year as then, the Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago. Once again, an unpopular Democratic incumbent bedeviled by an ill-conceived imperial war dropped out during the primaries. And again, young antiwar protesters have found themselves at the wrong end of police batons, often at the behest of Democratic officials. As 1968 began, Lyndon B. Johnson squeaked out a win in the New Hampshire primary over the antiwar Eugene McCarthy.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Sammy Feldblum
Daniel Denvir, the host of the socialist podcast The Dig, at home in Providence, Rhode Island. Photograph: Cody O’Loughlin/The GuardianThe elected officials, party functionaries, staffers and donors descending on Chicago for the most rollicking Democratic national convention in more than half a century will welcome an unlikely guest.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
therealnews.com | John Schmidt |Sammy Feldblum
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on June 30, 2024. It is shared here with permission. Why has it been so difficult for students demanding divestment from Israel to catch their university administrations’ ears? Part of the answer is the specific content of the request: universities’ donors are more than their students.
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Jun 30, 2024 | 
jacobin.com | Sammy Feldblum
Why has it been so difficult for students demanding divestment from Israel to catch their university administrations’ ears? Part of the answer is the specific content of the request: universities’ donors are more pro-Israel than their students. Schools hoping to both quell the protests and continue courting philanthropic support find themselves balancing competing and perhaps irreconcilable interests.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Rainer Diana Hamilton |Sammy Feldblum |T.M. Brown |Arielle Isack
I’m reacquiring taste, returning to the naturalRelish for learning how a woman sits, miming her calm,Associating her with piano, the saints, good dreams,Refracted light, whatever else that science wants to dull. I’m tying her to logic, even easily. See, KeatsWas wrong to say that touch of cold philosophy was “mere”—For me, it charms by making formal jokes.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | J.w. McCormack |Kaila Philo |Tarence Ray |Sammy Feldblum
“Clouds passing over,” wrote Matsuo Bashō during the Edo period, “a dog peeing on the run / village winter shower.” Dogs guard the gates of Hades, weigh the discordant hearts of pharaohs, and accompany the Wild Hunt in Germanic mythology. Patient Argos crapped out at the homecoming of brave Ulysses, Virginia Woolf immortalized the Brownings’ cocker spaniel in Flush: A Biography, and Kenneth Koch wrote that a barking dog in the snow means good weather is coming.
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May 8, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Sammy Feldblum
On April 17, hundreds of students at Columbia University pitched tents on the South Lawn, demanding that the institution divest from Israel amid that country’s continued attacks in Gaza. The following day, Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, Columbia’s president, called in the New York Police Department to sweep the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” leading to more than a hundred student arrests and helping to propel a proliferation of the protest’s tactics and demands to campuses nationwide.
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Dec 13, 2023 | 
thebaffler.com | Sammy Feldblum
Memory can be stubborn, insistent, forceful—or as ephemeral as a cloud. Take this scene: an older woman, primly dressed in wool overcoat with blouse buttoned all the way to the top, sees a young woman paused on her TV screen in black and white. The young woman marches through the streets of Santiago in support of Chilean president Salvador Allende, her gaze resolute. Old friends of hers, watching the footage, had indicated that the woman depicted is Carmen Vivanco.
