Skip to content

Politics

Columns

For Chyron Out Loud
November 20, 2015
Even amid the fast-multiplying agora of digital platforms, tweets, and instagrams that make up our new millennial mediaverse, one almost-touching platitude continues to transfix the sober lords of the establishment press: the impartial, stern-yet-blasé myth of purely ...

Take Your Idealism Out of the Freezer
September 15, 2015
Just before the British General Election in early May, I encountered local candidates hustling for our votes in the neighborhood park. Among them was North Islington’s longstanding Labour MP, Jeremy Corbyn, whom I found delivering a heartfelt defense of the National Health ...

How to Move an Island
July 24, 2015
Time was, the military stuck to blowing things up—just ask the spirit of Elugelab, part of Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Elugelab was vaporized by the first ever test of an H-bomb on All Saints’ Day 1952, ascending to heaven and leaving behind only a deep ...

Historical Hangovers, New Millennial Crusaders
Review of The Rise of the Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution by Patrick Cockburn. It once looked as if America’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might provide, if not victory, at least a fig leaf—a “decent interval” during which anti-U.S. terrorists would ...

Bending Toward Real Justice
July 02, 2015
In the moving celebrations that came in the wake of the SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage in America last week, the White House and Empire State Building were both bathed in a commemorative rainbow light and the Washington D.C. Gay Men’s Chorus sang a stirring ...

The Permanent War on Terror: Only As Old As It Feels
July 01, 2015
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the Islamic State. The most infamous cult of ultra-violent millenarian revolutionists since the Khmer Rouge celebrated the event in characteristic style: by murdering some people. On Friday, terrorist attacks in ...

The Unbearable Emptiness of Politics as Code
June 30, 2015
Nothing inspires nihilism quite like physical proximity to a U.S. presidential campaign. Having attended my first pseudo-event of the 2016 election cycle in San Francisco, I must now banish the encroaching numbness by speaking its name. Evil, thy name is campaign ...

It Sounds Like a Melody
June 25, 2015
Pope Francis’s recently released Laudato Si, or “Praise Be to You,” has been called “the climate encyclical” and “the environmental encyclical”—but while it’s true that the papal missive does address climate change, ...

Friedrich Hayek and the Void-oids
June 23, 2015
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, are argumentative. People like to point this out about the men who have been playing chicken with Europe and the IMF for the last five months, with the latest deadline for a Greek default looming. ...

Bloomberg’s Baby Davos
June 22, 2015
 In January 2012, when he was still mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg announced that he would spend the year mastering the lucrative but laborious work of computer programming, and that his tutor would be an internet startup called Codecademy. Later, he invested in that ...

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 ...

Flakes Alive!
June 12, 2015
On not attending the Left Forum  A few weeks back in Manhattan, hundreds of socialists, communists, anarchists, and even few decent “small-d” democrats shuffled into the unlikely venue of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (ironically, best known as a ...