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Month: September 2013

Columns

Diagnosis: Acute ThinkTankerism
September 17, 2013
There was the audible clicking of tongues, long sighs, and exasperated tut-tuts emanating from Slate last week when serial academic cum War Studies professor Thomas Rid fretted that the public debate over digital spying by the NSA, and its British counterpart the Government ...

Forbes Columnist Demands More Perks for the One Percent
September 17, 2013
Enough with the mindless demonization of our overclass! Forbes columnist Harry Binswanger – whose terse mission statement is to “defend laissez-faire capitalism, using Ayn Rand’s Objectivism” – has taken time out from his busy defense of insider ...

Occupy Realism: Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens
September 17, 2013
What went wrong with the American Left? In Dissident Gardens, his latest novel, Jonathan Lethem tries to figure it out. Billed as an “epic yet intimate family saga,” it tries to turn the current apolitical vogue of American family fiction against itself – but never quite ...

The Darby Principle
September 16, 2013
The terror at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was palpable. It was a Wednesday night, and the then-governor of Alaska was on stage, addressing a horde of thousands who hooted their approval as the governor delivered the words: “commu-ni-ty ...

Eric Schmidt in the Davosphere
September 16, 2013
Eric Schmidt has moved from the Googleplex to the Davosplex. I don’t mean that the chairman and former CEO of Google has actually set up shop in Davos, the picturesque little town in Switzerland and the highest city in Europe. Davos is notorious for hosting the World Economic ...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Patriarchy
September 15, 2013
Over at Slate last week—a place where half-thought memes go to die almost hourly, it seems—Hanna Rosin declared the end of the patriarchy. On paper, of course, I (and countless other ardent feminists like me) should be out in front of the wake for this sturdiest of ...

The Imaginarium of Dr. O’Bagy
September 13, 2013
In a way, it’s a shame that U.S. intervention in Syria may be avoided just as the cast is filling out. Playing the administration that heralds the threat of foreign WMD attacks in some far-off Middle Eastern land, we have the Obama administration. As the cantankerous ...

George Packer’s Abstract Period
September 12, 2013
Leaving a great abstraction untouched is the practice of an investigator who’s already chosen sides, or so suggests Baffler senior editor Chris Lehmann in his review of New Yorker staff writer George Packer’s latest book, The Unwinding. The review, published Thursday at ...

The Good, the Bad, and the Rhetorically Challenged
September 12, 2013
Appearing like Brigadoon out of the smog of American political discourse, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed is a weirdly clear-eyed piece that reads as a reminder that power doesn’t have to speak in the babbling gibberish of our ...

A Pax On All Your Houses
September 11, 2013
The Internet got off to a great start this week! It killed a man. Saw, acknowledged, then scalped him. He is dead, for now. We can all rest. The era of Pax Dickinson being-employed-while-having-an-offensive-Twitter is over. Pax Dickinson, the erstwhile chief technology officer ...

The Great American War Dance
September 10, 2013
Academic historians insist upon the uniqueness of periods and places. They tell tales of a world where “the past is a foreign country.” It’s rather striking to note, therefore, that the voice of American military power has remained consistent throughout our ...