I have just noticed, being a bit slow, a new on-line writing initiative, Public Seminar: I came across it checking out the latest from Jeff Goldfarb’s Deliberately Considered. Better late, etc. The editorial board includes people such as Nancy Fraser, Eli Zaretsky, and Simon Critchley. Best of all, it promises not just lots of interesting writing, but it also has an Index. A brilliant innovation for our digital age (please note, Bruno Latour). Here’s the pitch:

Confronting fundamental problems of the human condition and pressing problems of the day, using the broad resources of social research, we seek to provoke critical and informed discussion by any means necessary.

We use short form posts and long form essays, audio and video reports and discussions, and links to provocative materials of critical public interest anywhere we can find them. We are committed to creating a distinctive intellectual community, suspicious of clichés, informed by diverse experiences, theoretically heterodox, politically plural, worldly.

We work in the tradition of critical scholarship and public engagement of the original New School for Social Research (1919) and its University in Exile (1933). We seek to open the discussion of experts to broader publics, in the United States, and crucially far beyond, in the tradition of Charles Beard, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Emil Lederer, Max Wertheimer, Frieda Wunderlich, Hans Speier, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Public Seminar is an extension of The New School’s legendary “General Seminar,” founded by the original exile scholars. Through it, we are constituting a public seminar for the 21st century.