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Ritualized Denial
June 19, 2015
By now, some of the basic details are clear: on Wednesday night, nine people (six women, three men) were murdered in the basement sanctuary of “Mother” Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a bible study service. Victims include ...

No Big Chill for Us
June 18, 2015
“Only the young bring anything in—and they are not young very long,” said William Burroughs of American culture. This is obviously a warning, and not a dull truism, since Burroughs isn’t only referencing literal age, but also the co-opting of adolescent disdain for ...

The American Way
June 11, 2015
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni man, filed suit against the United States government this week over the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew in an unlawful 2012 drone strike. The suit is a tenacious follow up to an occasion in 2014 when Jaber was handed bundles of cash ...

Not Quite the People’s Court
June 05, 2015
With apologies to Marx, it seems that America has reversed one of his better-known aphorisms. Instead of history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, our spectacle-addled postmodern republic experiences it first as reality television, and then as politics. That, ...

The Fantastic Four Under Fire
May 29, 2015
Only in America can the skin color of someone who spends much of his waking life on fire supply the basis for a spirited pop-culture controversy. That’s the grim lesson of the media run-up to the latest in the long line of lumbering comics franchises’ superhero cash-cows ...

Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack.
May 22, 2015
This Monday, President Obama joined Twitter. That, clearly, was his first mistake. In short order, a barrage of racist tweets greeted our first African American president. The whole contretemps called to mind the premise of the popular “Obama’s Anger ...

Stacking the Deck
May 21, 2015
The Boston Bombings have achieved the status of a proper-noun title, reaching that rarified echelon reserved for the high-profile American atrocities that, like total eclipses, occur a few times each decade. With that status comes ubiquity. Everyone is familiar with the ...

Hell’s Pundits
May 20, 2015
When the news broke this weekend that a violent biker melee at a theme restaurant in Waco claimed nine lives and otherwise injured 18, there were all sorts of solemn topics available to the interlocuters of pundit discourse.  There was the awkward contrast of the Waco episode ...

America: Dangerous Curve Ahead
May 18, 2015
At some point in the early 1980s, a large yellow placard began turning up in the back window of cars proclaiming “Baby on Board.” At first it seemed a joke, an inadvertent high-sign that the driver was someone who took this parenthood thing a little too seriously. Even as ...

Spare Change
May 15, 2015
Roll over, Andrew Jackson, and tell Frederick Douglass the news. That, in essence, was the upshot of a feverishly buzzed-over online poll conducted earlier this week—except that the African American eminence selected to replace our redoubtably racist and ...

Nights of the Living Dread
May 01, 2015
This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly grim narrative template from the entertainment world: shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six ...

Politics: You Lose, You Snooze
April 27, 2015
This past weekend, both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz went to Vegas, to kneel in homage—oops, I mean make their personal policy pitches—at gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting. You can think of it this way: While the political press was ...