Todd McGowan

Todd McGowan

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019), Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (Northwestern University Press, 2017), and Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Costs of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016), and other works.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id

Freud died 80 years ago this week. In this "Virtual Roundtable," three scholars debate the legacy of his 1923 text.

Editors' Picks

Science & Technology

Can We Build a Better Facebook?

Is it time to turn our back on Facebook? And if so, what social network could possibly replace it?

Education & Society

Jews vs. the “Judeo-Christian Tradition”

Since the 1930s, the idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” has been used in American politics, but some Jews have always taken issue with the entire concept.

Verbatim: Fredric Jameson

Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson offered a philosophy of late capitalism that gave us a language for talking about globalization and the end of modernism.

Politics & History

The Genocide Before the Shoah

For a century, Jews in Turkey have maintained a strategic silence when it comes to recognizing the Armenian genocide. Could that be changing?

Lost Literacies Strips Down the Dawn of Comics

In his new book, literary historian Alex Beringer demonstrates how the birth of the genre of printed comic long preceded the Sunday Funny Pages.