Does Well-Being Have a Dollar Value?
Debt forgiveness, the art of the Chilean uprising, entering the nuclear arms Dark Ages, and more
September 22, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar, James Carroll examines the reality of nuclear dread; Jackson Todd and Susan F. Feiner unpack student debt; Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov chat with Jordi Mariné Jubany about the art of protest, Chilean estadillo–style; and Claire Potter tackles the urgent question of student mental health.
Protest Goes Pop
“We were living in Santiago in 2019 when the social uprising broke out. We started taking pictures of the graffiti because it was so gripping—first there were mostly tags of evade (meaning ‘evade’ the subway fare), but within a week the walls were covered with stencils, posters and ‘paste-ups.’ We ended up with an archive of photographs. Then, we started meeting with artists and collectives to understand the larger histories and strategies behind the political graphics.” Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics of the Chilean estallido and their new book, The Walls of Santiago (Berghahn Books, 2022), in a conversation with Jordi Mariné Jubany. (September 21, 2022)
Read an (illustrated!) excerpt from The Walls of Santiago on how the Joker, Pikachu, and other familiar figures in pop imagery become symbols of the Chilean social uprising. “One paste-up by Fab Ciraolo, for instance, shows Cecilia Morel, President Piñera’s wife, as one of the “Men in Black” [...] The image depicts a deadpan Morel in suit and sunglasses sitting in a pod. Funny on its own terms, the deeper logic references Morel’s off-the-record comment that the protesters appeared like an ‘alien invasion,’ a remark that was immediately leaked to the press and generated a protest graphic theme of aliens.” (September 21, 2022)
What Happened to Arms Control?
“Since 1945, militaries and nations in possession of the nuclear arsenals have declined ever to unlock, load, and launch them less for strategic or tactical reasons than for moral ones.” All that is changing now, writes James Carroll, in Part 3 of his series on anti-war activism. “Two generations of human beings have little or no memory of what it is to cower in fear of a coming atomic attack, much less of news that two cities in Japan had been incinerated and radiated. In the minds of many, the bomb today is not what it was decades ago.” (September 19, 2022)
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Student Well-Being
“We know (in the aggregate) how much is currently owed, but neither policymakers nor the public know the aggregate principal of the original loans. In other words, how much of the $1.9 trillion was actually borrowed—and how much of that sum is due to unchecked predatory lending and loan servicing practices?” Susan F. Feiner digs into just how little we really know about student debt. (September 21, 2022)
“According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, federal student debt will return to its current level of $1.6 trillion in just over five years. Adjusted for inflation, it will return to its current high by 2031—in only nine years.” Jackson Todd argues that now is the time for the American Left to enact real structural changes in the economy. (September 15, 2022)
“Since the pandemic began, addressing the mental health of students has evolved from an ongoing buzz to an urgent, insistent appeal that is drowning out almost every other issue in higher education except for the cost of attending college at all.” The pressing question, writes Claire Potter, is who should be responsible for student mental health. (September 8, 2022)