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Articles by Catherine Liu
The new politics of public suffering’ by Catherine Liu
Society is not what it used to be. A dangerous sensitivity has been spreading through the body politic via soft ideas, overindulgent parenting, and a disregard for the foundational ruggedness that once made this country/society/culture great. From right-wing podcasters to the Manosphere, this is the standard lament made against ubiquitous trauma. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
The Personal Consumed the Political
In today’s culture of compulsory personal disclosure and the monetization of trauma narratives, the personal has entirely consumed the political Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering will officially hit shelves tomorrow, with a launch at Foyles in London (Catherine will be in conversation with writer William Davies).
Intense short Remember This screens at the New Jersey Film Festival!
By Catherine Liu originally published: 09/16/2026 Andrew Serban’s short film Remember This caught me in its visual logic before anything else, prompting me to explore its themes of certainty and ambiguity, which kept me engaged throughout. The black-and-white cinematography feels like a world that presents itself in certainties, in right and wrong, true and false, yet the more I watched, the less I could verify anything.
Extract — Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering by Catherine Liu
Read an excerpt from Catherine Liu's forthcoming book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, where she explores and challenges how trauma has become a weapon in the culture wars – amid the collapse of liberal politics, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action.
Dancing with Horses at the New Jersey Film Festival
By Catherine Liu originally published: 09/09/2026 In Imprinted, the film opens with a dancer saying she learned early to be resilient, to keep moving, always anticipating the next moment, and that the resilience distanced her from her heart. Eighty minutes later, the film ends in stillness. Everything between those two points is the route from one to the other, and the route runs through horses.
Granzyme B Is Critical for T Cell Receptor-Induced Cell Death of Type 2 Helper T Cells
Main text (Immunity 25, 237–247; August 2006) Image misplacements were identified in Figure 5. Specifically, in Figure 5A bottom (Th2) and Figure 5B, the left and right images were inadvertently placed in the wrong order during figure assembly. The corrected figure now shows the correct order. This correction does not affect the conclusions of the paper.
Introducing the PSSSR Emerging Writers Fund
Catherine Liu and the Palm Springs School for Social Research are opening applications for the PSSSR Emerging Writers Fund. Intellectual life should not be restricted to those with access to elite institutions.
Catherine Liu: »Die Klasse, die das Kapital bändigen sollte, wurde zu seiner Komplizin«
Die Medienwissenschaftlerin Catherine Liu gehört zu den schärfsten Kritikerinnen der liberalen Mittelschicht. In ihrem Buch Virtue Hoarders beschreibt sie die Professional-Managerial Class als eine Klasse, die sich moralisch überlegen gibt, aber die Macht des Kapitals nicht mehr herausfordert.
Putting the Marxism Back Into “Cultural Marxism”
Interview by Ben Burgis Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. She’s the author of several books, most recently Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class and the forthcoming Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. In the last few years, she’s emerged as a razor-sharp and compelling critic of identity politics and middle-class liberalism, and a champion of a renewed materialist left politics.
A Picture of Health
Lit by the cold fluorescence of 21st-century institutional medicine, human illness and raw suffering, medical drama The Pitt, which premiered last year, sweeps viewers into the relentless rhythm of an urban emergency room. The television series, set in the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, has garnered most of the major awards and nominations to which prestige television can aspire, including a raft of Emmys and Golden Globes—with more likely to come.
Womb with a View
Who doesn’t love a one-set film with protagonists on doomed missions, trapped in a faulty piece of technology? When my son was aged around six or seven and I was shuttling him around Southern California’s child hotspots, I played the David Bowie song Space Oddity so often that my boy knew almost all the lyrics to a ballad about a junkie floating around in a space capsule, losing touch with “ground control” even as he merges with the cosmos in a drug-induced fever dream.
I’ve Had Enough of Cinema’s Obsession with Art as Therapy
‘As if the fullness of our souls did not sometimes overflow the emptiest metaphors, because no one ever can express the exact measure of their needs, or ideas or suffering, and that the human word is like a broken pot on which we bang out tunes to which bears dance, when that music was meant to make the stars themselves weep.’ —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856, translation mine) Family trauma is the material from which two recent films spin their narratives: Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which is...
The Problem with Cinematic Liberalism
Two films stand out to me in 2025: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides. Both try to cover the passage of time through acts of epic cinematic imagination that I appreciate for the sheer scale of their directors’ ambitions. But ideologically, these films could not be more different from one another in terms of their relationship to recent history—though both represent a real breakdown in the liberal imagination as a hegemonic force in the world.
Mirroring and Pseudo-Empathy
People are using AI chatbots as friends, friends who are fawning and fake versions of real people. Now they are supposed to be adequate replacements for human clinicians, who are in short supply relative to demand for mental health care. According to a recent New York Times article, “This Therapist Helped Clients Feel Better: It was AI,” the newest versions of AI therapists have produced positive outcomes for their users.
Ending the Spectacle of Infantilism
The prevalence of mental illness among young people has been framed as a social problem in desperate need of both awareness and attention. The largest national and international agencies are already attuned to the matter.
Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (w/ Catherine Liu) | The Chris Hedges Report
This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble. The material needs of working class people in America continue to be obscured and co-opted by politicians and people claiming to know what’s best on both sides of the political aisle. While Republicans and right-wingers address some of these needs head on, they do so by luring people through empty rhetoric and culture war distractions.
Working Mother
In 1822, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a radical Nottingham lacemaker named Susannah Wright appeared in court, acting as her own defense just after having given birth to a child. Wright was a nursing mother during her trial for “blasphemous libel.” She had been arrested for selling pamphlets defending universal (male) suffrage and freedom of speech.
Professional Populists in the Culture Wars
The war fought over the literary canon in the 1980s-90s could be considered the original “culture war,” in the debased, necrotic form that we have come to know today. This conflict pitted a new guard of New Left cultural studies professionals against the order of things—namely, aesthetic hierarchy, the “canon,” any group of books alleged to be “great,” and therefore required reading for all intellectual and academic aspirants.
A Pioneer in Redefining User Experience Design
By: Catherine Liu In the ever-evolving world of design, few figures are as influential as Zeyuan Zhang, whose groundbreaking contributions to user experience (UX) design have garnered international recognition and industry-wide respect. In this exclusive interview, we explore Zeyuan’s journey, his design philosophy, and the transformative projects that have cemented his role as a global leader in UX design. Zeyuan: My path into UX design was somewhat unexpected.
Kamala’s Postmodern Liberalism
The 21st-century Democratic Party is the party of postmodern politics: Their best candidates, like their “best” policy positions, mime the emptiness of playful signifiers freed from a referential world, indulging in decorative gestures.
La cultura del trauma y la mercantilización de la salud mental (parte 2) - El Salto - Edición General
Salto a contenido Salto a navegación Contenidos portada Accesibilidad image/svg+xml We can't find the internet Attempting to reconnect Something went wrong! Hang in there while we get back on track Nada menos que la desmercantilización de la salud mental nos permitirá afrontar el trauma y el sufrimiento humano de manera socialmente responsable.
La cultura del trauma y la mercantilización de la salud mental - El Salto - Edición General
Salto a contenido Salto a navegación Contenidos portada Accesibilidad image/svg+xml La atención especial que se presta actualmente a todas las formas de trauma, salvo la explotación económica, ha contribuido a camuflar el problema clave del neoliberalismo.
Walter Benjamin nowhere to be found
For 40 years, Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction essay was a critical part of Humanities curriculum. It blew my mind when I read it because I thought that Benjamin was trying to historicize contemporary art under the conditions of the marketplace and under the aegis of technological innovation. I guess all the anti-canon and anti-Eurocentrism young people in academia got tired of him. It was tiring to hear all the encomia to Benjamin and Benjamin trivia.
Philip Guston Now and Trauma Culture
Guston’s retrospective at the National Gallery is full of wall text warning the viewer about potentially traumatic material (the cartoonish KKK figures mentioned i the earlier post) but also LOTS of biographical information to make sure that we all knew that Guston was a very traumatized person. His father hung himself when he was ten. His brother was killed in a freak accident when his car rolled over him and crushed his legs.
Philip Guston's Cancellation
Run, if you can, don’t walk to see the Philip Guston show up at the National Gallery in Washington DC. Philip Guston Now, a retrospective of the painter’s work was cancelled literally, OK, not literally, but postponed at the height of art world pearl clutching, condescension and bad conscience during the George Floyd riots, the pandemic and a cresting sense of elite hysteria about the primitive power of images and the stupidity of viewers.
Universities are turning into real-estate hedge funds — and students are paying the price
The most cutting jokes are the ones with a bit of truth behind them. While the increasingly popular quip that "colleges are just real-estate hedge funds with classes attached" may inspire eye rolls, recent moves are making the joke cut deeper. In January, the University of California system — one of the largest public-university systems in the world and where I teach — made a $4 billion investment in the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust fund, one of the world's largest real-estate funds.
How universities became giant piggy banks for hedge-fund billionaires
The most cutting jokes are the ones with a bit of truth behind them. While the increasingly popular quip that "colleges are just real-estate hedge funds with classes attached" may inspire eye rolls, recent moves are making the joke cut deeper. In January, the University of California system - one of the largest public-university systems in the world and where I teach - made a $4 billion investment in the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust fund, one of the world's largest real-estate funds.
Tár Money Grindset
Tár, the recent classical music-based drama starring Cate Blanchett, has been an unexpected critical success: it has been nominated for six Oscars and, since its opening, has generated a steady stream of reviews and think pieces from almost every possible corner (although the reviews definitely skew from liberal publications). The New York Times has published at least nine different articles about it.
We Need To Decommodify Mental Health Care
Credits Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine and the author of “Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class” (2021). She is at work on her next book, tentatively titled “Exploiting Trauma: Standardized Suffering in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” As a species, human beings have always been vulnerable to the shock of an unforeseen violation of body, mind and spirit.
A Conversation on Charting the Career Path
Recently, I had the pleasure to join a panel discussion as a panelist on Charting the Career Path with a group of young professionals in the Toronto tech industry. It was a small yet effective forum. As panelists, we shared the different paths we took to leadership roles in our respective organizations, managing the delicate balance between technical craft and strategic leadership. We also explored a few challenges and opportunities facing women and young professionals in the technology sector.
The REALM of Growth Management
About half a year ago, my son embarked on a journey to learn Taekwondo. I would be lying if I said the past 6 months have been a smooth sail. Just like any new idea or strategy being executed, there are many ups and downs both operationally and emotionally at the beginning. Even to date, my son is still in the process of finding his place and building his comfort level in the Taekwondo class.
The World Overseen
This essay appears in Issue 1 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here. Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu University of Minnesota Press, 90 pp., $10.00 Liu, consistent and lucid, provides the same kind of analysis of PMC virtue-hoarding in the realms of family values, literature, and gender theory.
The World Overseen by Matthew Gasda ~radfyn-sipner
Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu University of Minnesota Press, 90 pp., $10.00 The term Professional Managerial Class, coined in 1977 by John and Barbara Ehrenreich—and defined as “managers, ‘specialists,’ technocrats, technical intelligentsia”—is back in vogue; there is a PMC discourse now. For the Ehrenreichs, the term PMC was meant to distinguish “between people who worked essentially telling other people what to do . . .
Jesse Jackson’s “Suburban Ecologies”: Irvine, Refracted
SEPTEMBER 12, 2021 JESSE JACKSON’S SHOW Suburban Ecologies, installed at the Palm Court Arts Complex at Irvine, California, had an unconventional run from December 6, 2020, to March 14, 2021. As an exhibit, it took as its object the topography and built environment of Orange County and Irvine.
The Apotheosis of the Professional Class
An incident of alleged racial profiling at Smith College in 2018 provides a window into the extraordinary culture cultivated in elite colleges in the United States. The article is a careful reconstruction of the context in which the president of Smith College suspended an employee accused and later exonerated of racism in the context of the professional- managerial class’s abandonment of basic liberal norms.
How Liberal Elites Use Race to Keep Workers Divided-And Justify Class-Based Inequities
The Pulitzer Center allegedly “raises awareness of underreported global issues through direct support of quality journalism across all media platforms and a unique program of education and public outreach.” Its most prolific donor is Emily Rauh Pulitzer and the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Foundation. Widow of newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer, Rauh Pulitzer is also a major donor to the arts.
Project MUSE - Virtue Hoarders
A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways.
The PMC Has Children
Book cover provided by University of Minnesota Press / Headshot by Peter Krapp _____ From the very moment of conception, which for professional managerial class (PMC) parents is always a “choice,” the future child and infant possesses “potential” that has to be both optimized and maximized. PMC mothers have to do prenatal yoga while setting up intrauterine Mozart streams on pregnant bellies. Preparing for a child is just the beginning of a torturous and expensive preoccupation for today’s elites.
School is Back in Session Amid COVID: Student Housing Loans Cheat Sheet
As millions of students across the U.S. return to university campuses for in-person or remote instruction, this September's back to school move-in process is like none we have seen before.
Meritocracy Agonistes
Whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses. Theodor Adorno Reimagining collective life means destroying the meritocracy and the tentacular, “elite” institutions that support it. To remake the world in a more just way, we have to engage in revolutionary “blue sky” thinking currently monopolized by tech bros.
New Vancomycin Guidelines (AAC Journal)
Editors in Conversation is the official podcast of the American Society for Microbiology Journals. Editors in Conversation features discussions between ASM Journals Editors, researchers and clinicians working on the most cutting edge issues in the microbial sciences.
WeWork: So Now What? Coworking Giant's CMBS Exposure Up To $5.6 Billion
We've received many inbound requests to refresh our CMBS exposure summary for WeWork, and each time we've been somewhat surprised with the co-sharing giant’s growing presence in newly-issued securitized transactions. This is especially the case given the amount of scrutiny following the firm’s pulled IPO debacle and a rather steep valuation cut.
Demographics Drive Booming Housing Markets Out West
Aided by the decreasing affordability of single-family homes and shifting demographic preferences for renting over homeownership, multifamily remains one of the CRE sectors showcasing the strongest growth in recent years.To determine the effect of shifting market factors on the property type’s performance, Trepp examined its database of consecutive year-end financials on 23,479 private-label multifamily loans across the nine census divisions delineated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Letters to the Editor: Jenny Brown Responds to “Anti-Labor Politics”
OCTOBER 15, 2019 Jenny Brown Responds to Meredith Goldsmith, Anna Kryczka, and Catherine Liu’s “Anti-Labor Politics” (September 9, 2019): DEAR EDITOR, In “Anti-Labor Politics,” (September 9) the reviewers misread my book, Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work. I’m not calling for a birth strike, I’m saying women in the United States are spontaneously conducting one, and since our individual decisions are pressuring the power structure, we should now make collective demands.
Anti-Labor Politics
SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 WE WANTED TO EMBRACE Jenny Brown’s new book, Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work, but her arguments left us with a number of reservations and more questions than her analysis and research could answer. We read the book together and intend to critique it in the context of our appreciation for her achievement: Brown draws upon the critical terms of labor and exploitation to create a dynamic picture of American family policy.
Oriental Girls Desire Romance
It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor, and even cheaper entertainment.
What does FRTB Mean for the CMBS Industry?
Catherine Liu Written on March 10, 2016 in CMBS , CMBS Issuance , Commercial Real Estate Lending A myriad of regulations for risk retention and market liquidity scheduled for implementation in the next few years could potentially hamper activity in the CMBS and securitization industry.
Every Child Needs the Good Enough State
It took the devastation of the Civil War to establish government provision for veterans and their kin. Panic about childhood and its inviolability along with a collective sense of responsibility for soldiers, widows, and their children intensified at the end of World War I. Mass immigration, industrialization, and financial crises also cast new light on collective responsibility for the suffering and deprivation of society’s most vulnerable. Agitators such as Jane Addams and Eugene V.
VS Magazine
When I was a graduate student at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York in the late 1980s, I took enough Art History credits to be in that program even though I was doing a PhD in French. I thought interdisciplinarity was the future of all academic work.
Every Child Needs the Good Enough State
It took the devastation of the Civil War to establish government provision for veterans and their kin. Panic about childhood and its inviolability along with a collective sense of responsibility for soldiers, widows, and their children intensified at the end of World War I. Mass immigration, industrialization, and financial crises also cast new light on collective responsibility for the suffering and deprivation of society’s most vulnerable. Agitators such as Jane Addams and Eugene V.
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