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Sanjib Baruah’s new book In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast, published in 2020 by Stanford University Press, takes the history of the troubled relationship between India and its Northeast “as a vantage point to reflect on how the generalization of the territorially circumscribed nation-form, and of the sovereignty of the nation-state, has played out since decolonization.” In doing so, Baruah develops a sketch of how these political forms—seemingly inevitable—are actually “highly contingent artifacts.”
 

Mayer, who will assume her new post in September, is currently director of outreach and programs for the King County Library System in Washington State, one of the busiest libraries in the United States. She graduated from Bard with a joint major in American Studies and Multiethnic Studies, and holds an MS in Library Information Services from the University of Washington. Of her new appointment Mayer says, “This is a fantastic library system, and I am looking forward to collaborating on providing the most responsive services we can.”

“Its blind spots about the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans meant that when the culture wars began to rage, from the mid-1960s onward, voices like his seemed not so much wrong as irrelevant to both right and left,” writes Professor Aldous in the Wall Street Journal. “The legacy of that dead end continues to haunt the middle ground of American politics to this day.”

“What did normal, before the pandemic, look like? Several trillion dollars of needed repairs in our crumbling infrastructure. Normal was 87 million Americans who either didn’t have health insurance or were underinsured. Normal was 500,000 medical-related bankruptcies every single year in this country. Normal was 40 million people living in poverty. Normal was millions of people who aren’t prepared for retirement; who can’t afford to send their kids to school or can’t pay back their student loan debt. . . . These are the deficits that matter. Those are the kinds of shortfalls that I wish that we were all worried about.”

Created as part of Professor Peter Klein’s Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course Hudson Valley Cities / Environmental (In)Justice, Galloway and Avery’s project distributes resource kits to high-volume homeless shelters in Kingston, as well as the community organization Beyond the 4 Walls Outreach Program. Not limited to masks, wipes, and PPE equipment, Thrive On! Kingston kits include other essentials such as soap, shaving kits, body wash, shampoo, reusable bags, water bottles, notebooks, pens, and blankets, among other items.

Marokey Sawo, a 2020 graduate of the Levy Economics Institute master’s program in economic theory and policy, and coauthor Michele Evermore take a second look at the percentage of laid-off workers getting better pay from the enhanced unemployment benefits that expired last week. “Many workers lose more than just wages in unemployment―they lose employer contributions to health insurance, paid leave, and retirement benefits as well,” they write. “These individuals are likely receiving less, not more, in unemployment than they were in their former jobs, even after accounting for the $600 per week benefits boost.”

“That slight asynchrony we like between ourselves and others is unpleasantly magnified by glitchy wifi,” writes Dunphy-Lelii in Scientific American. “Research shows that a response delay of as little as 1.2 seconds disrupts your feeling of connection with another person. You can’t read them, they can’t read you—are they laughing with you, or at you?”