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Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein is a contributing editor of The Baffler. He is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, among other books. He lives in Chicago.

He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. He lives in Chicago.

Brodner Obama Library

There Goes the Neighborhood

On January 14, I approached the field house in Washington Park, the 150-year-old jewel of Chicago’s archipelago of green spaces, for the second of two public meetings to discuss the University of Chicago’s bid to host Barack Obama’s presidential library. The university was ...
reagan

Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges

When Ronald Reagan entered politics in the sixties, most observers judged him a joke. When Reagan announced he was running for the Republican nomination for California governor in 1966, the Washington Star described the “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor ...

Outside My Window

Outside my window: a gray day in Ann Arbor. Two cops—in shorts, on bicycles—glide by. A roiling sea of blue and gold middle-aged bodies ambling onward, purposefully. A sign on my front porch: “Reserved Parking Only.” A navy mini-van vomits forth a pot-bellied man with a ...

Picasso at 25

1963: Before Picasso In 1963, Chicago architect William Hartman was assigned the task of procuring an appropriate sculpture for the plaza in front of the newly-built civic center his firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, had designed. The center was Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ...

Hannabarbildungsroman

I When public television aired Ken Burns’s ninety-part series on the Civil War, eggheads tripped over each other to proclaim this soft-spoken young writer as the American Homer, the architect of a Yankee national epic. The series was more than just good television; it was the ...