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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 ...

The American Way
June 11, 2015
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni man, filed suit against the United States government this week over the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew in an unlawful 2012 drone strike. The suit is a tenacious follow up to an occasion in 2014 when Jaber was handed bundles of cash ...

Not Quite the People’s Court
June 05, 2015
With apologies to Marx, it seems that America has reversed one of his better-known aphorisms. Instead of history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, our spectacle-addled postmodern republic experiences it first as reality television, and then as politics. That, ...

The Kurds Are Alright
June 04, 2015
The Islamic State is a movement; therefore, it proselytizes. Plenty has been written about IS recruiting young people from the West. Much of the coverage has the timbre of “the kids aren’t alright” exposés on the secret sex lives of teens. There’s an almost ...