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The Jaundiced Eyeball

Columns

The Art of the Con
June 23, 2016
Just as in the final chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the wheezing sociopath at the center of the Donald Trump campaign has revealed his true decrepit, disfigured nature at a moment when the belated appearance of the unvarnished truth likely will do zero good for any of ...

Not Intended for Mature Audiences
June 16, 2016
Yes, Donald Trump is once more laying into the media establishment that somehow attacks and slanders him while also acting as the premier delivery system for the bigoted ego rampages that the weary electorate has come to know as Trumpism. The invective-spewing maestro of ...

Sexting, Lies, and Videotape
June 09, 2016
Midway through the painfully exhaustive documentary Weiner, the title subject’s wife, Hillary Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin, is puttering around her Manhattan kitchen, fumbling through an array of flatware in an effort to give a semblance of normalcy to her day. One of the ...

Who’s Defamin’ Who?
June 02, 2016
Anyone who’s trudged through the past fortnight’s worth of punditry about the Gawker–Hulk Hogan–Peter Thiel donnybrook can be forgiven a fugitive longing for the codes of honor that settled sexually charged dude-feuds back in the bad old age of chivalry. ...

Facebook’s ‘Injection Tools’
May 26, 2016
So it’s come to this. After half a century of right-wing invective targeting the alleged scourge of liberal media bias, conservative activists are up in arms over the (unverified) claim that social-media page designers are tweaking impartial news-feed algorithms—in a ...

The Trump Psyche
May 19, 2016
You know that the Trump distemper in our body politic has risen to a new threat status because our journalistic thought leaders are enlisting the help of mental-health professionals. The new issue of the Atlantic, for one, features a stem-winding cover story by psychologist Dan ...

Blame It on Higher Ed
May 12, 2016
In a crisis, it’s only natural for us to recur to the familiar totems of our folk beliefs. So, shortly after the de facto elevation of omni-bigot Donald Trump to the 2016 GOP presidential ticket, the estimable big thinkers at the New York Times op-ed shop rolled up their ...

Pacts Americana
May 05, 2016
Hearken to your geopolitical catechisms, America, for there are new trade accords in the air! Trade deals punctuate the placid world-conquering assurance of the global economic elite with the same ritual, righteous certainty offered by a Hollywood Spider-Man reboot, or the ...

His Inanity Bubbleth Over
April 27, 2016
We’re nearing the endgame of a tumultuous and anxiety-inducing primary season, and the pundits are feeling feisty. You can’t blame them, really. Campaign ’16 has been an unrelieved study in the terrible folly of confident campaign prognostication. Remember anointed ...

Hillary’s Courtiers
April 21, 2016
You could almost hear the great sigh of relief heaving across cable TV’s green rooms and the news-curating portals of our media nation: sure, the Republican side of Campaign ’16 continues to resemble a dumpster fire on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road, but the Democrats, bless ...

Chronicle of a Creep
April 14, 2016
In his epic fifteen-page New Yorker tour through the career of hotelier and self-proclaimed sex researcher Gerald Foos, Gay Talese briefly entertains a moral quandary. Why should he, Talese—the big-picture chronicler of media empires and wayward human intimacies—take ...

Dox Populi: A Few Missing Links
April 07, 2016
What if they held a mammoth document leak and nobody came? That seems, with a slight allowance for hyperbole, the impact of the release of 2.6 terabytes of data from the inner sanctums of Mossack Fonseca, the high-rolling Panamanian law firm. Mossack Fonseca—which is, ...