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It’s Always Mourning in America
May 28, 2015
For the most part, Memorial Day was celebrated in Washington with the usual cynical platitudes. Senator Tom Cotton, in a discharge of vacuity, sentimentalized the cost of combat while ever pushing for more of it. Par for the course in D.C. Some, however, considered this most ...

Victor Serge, The Unconquered
May 25, 2015
Some writers are destined to have two deaths—the first in life, and the second in memory. The lucky ones can be resurrected from that second death by cultural circumstance and the aid of overseeing angels, irked by injustice, believing these Lazaruses should be helped from ...

Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack.
May 22, 2015
This Monday, President Obama joined Twitter. That, clearly, was his first mistake. In short order, a barrage of racist tweets greeted our first African American president. The whole contretemps called to mind the premise of the popular “Obama’s Anger ...

Stacking the Deck
May 21, 2015
The Boston Bombings have achieved the status of a proper-noun title, reaching that rarified echelon reserved for the high-profile American atrocities that, like total eclipses, occur a few times each decade. With that status comes ubiquity. Everyone is familiar with the ...

Nausea in the UK
May 19, 2015
It still feels like the morning after. People still have headaches, feel dizzy, nauseous, confused. What happened? A party controlled by inept bullies has been swept into power with a parliamentary majority of 51%. Stalwart objectors point out that under the UK’s ...

Spare Change
May 15, 2015
Roll over, Andrew Jackson, and tell Frederick Douglass the news. That, in essence, was the upshot of a feverishly buzzed-over online poll conducted earlier this week—except that the African American eminence selected to replace our redoubtably racist and ...

The Empire Strikes Back
May 14, 2015
Seymour Hersh is a pioneer of investigative journalism, the modern iteration of which he fashioned almost singlehandedly by uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam War. Americans had opposed the war before My Lai—everyone knew what the American government was ...

Knows a Little of What’s Going On
May 07, 2015
In Ferguson and Baltimore, out and out racism has hidden behind the conceptual cudgel of “supporting the police.” Less iconic but almost as ubiquitous as the protests themselves have been the counter demonstrations of much smaller crowds, nearly all white, gathered in a ...

Nights of the Living Dread
May 01, 2015
This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly grim narrative template from the entertainment world: shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of six ...

Murder by Other Means
April 30, 2015
In a recent New York Times op-ed on the murder conviction handed out to four former Blackwater guards charged with killing seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007, former paratrooper and mercenary Sean McFate offers a chillingly nihilistic endorsement of large-scale contract killing ...

Free Speech Culture Warriors of the World, Unite
April 29, 2015
It can be hard keeping track of all the awards that PEN America gives out. The organization, devoted to promoting freedom of expression, offers some two dozen, for translations, essays, novels, plays, and seemingly, every single other literary form. (There are two awards for ...

Politics: You Lose, You Snooze
April 27, 2015
This past weekend, both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz went to Vegas, to kneel in homage—oops, I mean make their personal policy pitches—at gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting. You can think of it this way: While the political press was ...