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Unexecuted Ideas of an Irish Republic
April 22, 2016
There is still no government in Ireland, more than nine weeks after the general election knocked down the ruling coalition that had imposed Troika-mandated austerity. This means that Enda Kenny, after losing the first vote that would have re-elected him Taoiseach (prime ...

Getting Your Irish Up
February 26, 2016
As Ireland heads out to the polling booths today to vote in a general election, the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916—the doomed rebellion that kicked off the war for Irish independence from England—looms, framing the struggle for economic democracy ...

The White Knight Delusion
February 23, 2016
Even before full details emerged of the string of rapes and sexual assaults in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve—perpetrated by men described as predominately African or Arab in appearance—the news was met with a heady mix of horror, pure outrage, and vigorous ...

Flu in the Face
February 04, 2016
Anyone who spends time in enclosed public spaces is barraged with images from television news, most often broadcast from the default network, CNN. We glimpse these images, with the sound down, for only seconds at a time as they bounce, germ-like, from corner to corner, chasing ...

All the President’s Chums
January 06, 2016
It seems odd, after the media revolutions of the past several decades, to behold one of the worst conventions of the old press order soldiering blithely on: the private, off-the-record presidential briefing. In a curiously noncommittal dispatch for the New York Times, D.C. ...

Waiving the Age of Reason
January 05, 2016
Most kids start to learn their multiplication tables in the third grade. Their storybooks—typically illustrated, with only a few sentences per page—begin to give way to short chapter books. A year later, they are taught the difference between sedimentary and volcanic rock. ...

A Tale of Two Citations
December 15, 2015
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend, an English teacher in a Brooklyn public school, began preparing to teach her tenth-grade students The Metamorphosis. She asked me for a few examples of the Kafkaesque. I had two: first, a French thriller I saw in high school, in which a man with a ...

Media Abets Trump’s Shock-Jock Statesmanship
December 09, 2015
It’s not that Trump’s announcement wasn’t newsworthy, shocking, and terrifying—it was all those things, in spades. Rather, the tenor of the coverage made it seem, as it usually does in Trump’s case, that Trump’s Hitleresque scheme struck the astonished American ...

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 ...