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Interview with Whistleblower Bill Binney
May 23, 2016
Bill Binney resigned from his job as technical director of the NSA in October 2001. The data-monitoring tool he had developed, ThinThread, had been shelved and, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush-Cheney administration chose dragnet monitoring instead. He spoke to Kade ...

Irish Exceptionalism: The Nationalist Left
May 09, 2016
Coming to Ireland from the United States, particularly the United States in 2016 under the looming shadow of Trumpism, the latest incarnation of a nasty right-wing populism that wraps itself in the flag and scapegoats immigrants for its troubles, it was hard to feel that a ...

The Spanish Democracy Revolutions
May 06, 2016
The Zapatistas of Chiapas have a phrase: “The fight for democracy is a slow burn.” It resonates at the Parliament of Catalonia, and all across the Spanish state, where indignation is rife. Research over there late last year gave me the opportunity to see four post-capitalist ...

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 ...