Corey Pein

What do you get when you combine an atomized, alienated public that possesses a deep and justifiable mistrust in institutions with a floundering press-political-entertainment complex that’s desperate to hold our nanoscopic attention spans? You get a nation of half-assed ...

I went to bed smugly satisfied last night after UK Independence Party leader and charmless performative drunk Nigel Farage conceded defeat. It seemed Britain had hung together and voted to Remain in the European Union after all. I woke up to a different reality. The Leave ...

There is no escape from the grotesque waking nightmare that is the 2016 elections. Not even sleep offers refuge. Some friends of mine have been plagued by dreams of Donald Trump. As the journalistic cliché goes, they . . . are not . . . alone. Guardian columnist George Monbiot ...

All propaganda is not advertising, but all advertising is propaganda. With “sponsored content” becoming the norm, corporations hiring “reporters” to cover themselves, and media organizations hiring political operatives to deliver the news, the notion that ...

Narratives are made by the artful omission of facts. Never was this maxim more evident than in a gullible feature story that landed on the front page of the New York Times last fall, about a young woman’s last-ditch bid for life extension as she succumbed to the ravages of ...

The witch-doctors of the electoral season have utterly failed in their essential task; that is, to explain the alarming spectacle that has befallen the land like a sudden eclipse. Political reporters, consultants and pundits are flailing in astonishment as “the unthinkable ...

Futile wars may inspire worthy books, after the fact. Unfortunately the “global war on terror” is both futile and perpetual, leaving no practical room for experience-chastened hindsight. Much like the mobbed-up system of government contracting and lobbying kickbacks, the ...

One cool morning last fall I followed a canal from my hostel in Amsterdam to the chic DeLaMar Theater. The theater was once a Big Data archive, a custodian of the records of a Nazi labor program that sent Dutch civilians to toil in German fields and factories, and was firebombed ...