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All Hail the Shutdown Circle Jerk
September 27, 2013
On Monday at midnight, funding for the federal government is set to expire. As they stand now, here are each party’s negotiating postures: the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, insist they will not fund the government so long as the new health care reform ...

Save Us from the Welfare Surfers
September 25, 2013
Ahh, the Dignity of Work. It is time, once again, to consider those old standbys, Work and Dignity. According to the House of Representatives, it seems that many a wayward American soul has lost sight of that most cherished ideal: the workday. These Americans have come up with ...

The Ted Cruz Show
September 25, 2013
Perhaps a bizarre Twitter account doesn’t rise to the level of high art, but there is something of the Ziegfeld Follies in the kind of political posturing that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rolled out this week on the Senate floor. For twenty-one hours and change, the senator ...

Moving Walls
September 25, 2013
Where matters. Specifically, where a monument is built matters a great deal. These constructions are grown on particular sites, out of particular plans and origins, with a particular intent that can be subverted, or reinforced, over time. The context of the monuments should ...

Immoral Inequivalencies
September 24, 2013
It’s hard to stretch the limits of historical hyperbole on the same day that Sen. Ted Cruz has declared that anyone skeptical about his cunning plan to filibuster an already ratified, signed, and Supreme Court-upheld law out of existence is akin to Nazi appeasers. Yet the ...

LinkedIn Will Email Your Exes For You
September 24, 2013
Baffled masses: Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Weeks before news broke that the popular social networking site LinkedIn was being sued by customers for regularly and shamelessly hacking into their customers’ email accounts, Ann Friedman’s sharp piece ...

The Practical Wife
September 23, 2013
There are a spate of sprawling cover stories published this week that concern the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary—the clearest signal yet that the next election cycle, which officially kicks off in three years’ time, has begun. Five years ago, during the marathon race for ...

TV Noir: The Saddest Cliche in the World
September 20, 2013
Are we witnessing the crystallization of the saddest cliché in the world? With one episode left in the first season of the addictive British series Broadchurch, the audience still doesn’t know who killed young Danny Latimer and time is running out for both the detectives and, ...

Under Fire: Empire and the Politics of Peace
September 19, 2013
Turns out Barack Obama is the commander in chief of the American military, and it’s “a role in which at times he has seemed uneasy.” This uneasiness, as the Washington Post reports, is a feeling whole-heartedly requited by top brass. “The prospect of an ...

The Summers Time Blues
September 18, 2013
At some point, President Barack Obama got it in his head that it would be a good idea to nominate the former Treasury secretary and director of his president’s National Economic Council, Larry Summers, to be the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. Most people who know of ...

From the Vault
September 18, 2013
Inspired by the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis, this week the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press writer Jason Linkins has done the yeoman’s work of compiling a panoply of books, films, and music on the subject. Among these he has kindly included his ...

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 ...