Please Be Real with Me
John D’Emilio’s gay Catholic boyhood, Simone de Beauvoir’s authentic self, and more
October 13, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar: an app to help us see climate risk in New York City, Brazil at a crossroads, banning the bomb, and more.
Desperately Seeking My Self
In an excerpt from his new book, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties (Duke University Press, 2022), John D’Emilio shares the challenges of leaving his “Catholic cocoon” to live among the nonbelievers at Columbia University. “In my application essay, I had written about my religious faith, and so I found myself in a group led by the Protestant campus minister. I sat there stunned as he informed us that ‘God is dead.’ He had us read and discuss Life against Death by Norman O. Brown, whose goal was to reinterpret Freud for the contemporary world. Mom would have scoffed at the notion of an unconscious mental life. Nor did the Catholicism I’d imbibed have much use for this way of thinking. But here I was being told that it was time to look deep inside and face my repressed desires. This was exactly what I was trying not to do!” (October 12, 2022)
“Finding your ‘authentic self’ is often taken to mean: ‘Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.’ But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing.” Skye C. Cleary sits down with Luis Jaramillo for a conversation about Cleary’s new book, How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment (St Martin’s Essentials, 2022) and the ethics of selfhood. (October 11, 2022)
Save the date! Join Public Seminar for an author reading and Q&A with John D’Emilio on November 1. To attend the event in person or online, register here.
Climate Change
“Even in large urban centers such as New York City, many communities lack access to urgently needed information about the potential impacts and risks of climate change or lack specialized expertise to translate this information into something meaningful.” Daniel Sauter, Timon McPhearson, and Christopher Kennedy introduce Ocellus XR, an open source mobile app that helps New Yorkers access local climate data through an immersive augmented reality experience. Designed by members of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School, Ocellus XR will allow users to discover current and future climate risks and nature-based solutions live at street level. (October 10, 2022)
Democracy
Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier examines the importance of the pamphlet as political text—and the role pamphleteering played in inspiring Britain to leave the European Union. “Flyers associated with Leave campaigns were plastered on streets or handed out at events, but they were also available for download, shared across social media, and embedded in online news articles.” (October 12, 2022)
“Videos went viral on the internet with people searching for food in trash trucks or asking for bones in butcher houses. Every year since Bolsonaro’s inauguration, the Amazon rainforest deforestation rates have reached record levels—with a persistent invasion of Natives’ reservations.” As Brazil enters a runoff election, Theo Almeida looks at the events that led to the country’s current political crossroads. (October 12, 2022)
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Peace Is Possible
“It would be tragic if the nuclear peril illuminations of the war in Ukraine were wasted. But what if, instead, they were fulfilled?” In the final installment of his reckoning with war, James Carroll considers a crucial turning point in anti-nuclear activism. (October 10, 2022)