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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 ...

An American Marriage, Revisited
April 24, 2015
Limited Partnership, a new documentary about one of the nation’s first gay couples to be lawfully married, begins with a scene you might find in a legal thriller: an establishing shot of gray-slate courthouse columns gives way to a scrum of reporters positioned nearby. ...

“Some Other Woman” for President 2016
April 21, 2015
When Hillary Clinton announced her presidential candidacy, it wasn’t surprising. But I was surprised by my own reaction. For the last week and a half now, I’ve been fighting back an overwhelming sense of dread. It isn’t dread of Hillary. I may have Bernie Sanders politics, ...

The Most Contaminated Place in the World
April 16, 2015
One of the more tragic results of the Information Age’s ballyhooed shrinking (or flattening or scrunching or crumpling) of the world is that we’re better apprised of international tragedies while also feeling less able to do anything about them. There’s an ethereal, ...

Spinner in Chief
April 09, 2015
Last week, the New York Times offered an invaluable preview of the rote and banal veneration that Hillary Clinton’s all-but-official presidential run will elicit, again and again, in our neoliberal media. In a bravura survey of media metanarratives—all presented, of course, ...

Why Is Twitter Aiding Turkish Censorship?
April 08, 2015
Corporations, like nation states, act out of self-interest. So it pays to be suspicious when a company claims to be on the side of social progress. Markets, with their inherent sociopathy, just don’t value things like justice and equity (well, not that kind of ...

California, by the Nuts
April 06, 2015
In response to the four-year-old California drought, Governor Jerry Brown ordered a 25 percent cut in water use by municipalities across the state last week. The edict has led to a familiar ring of selective fault-finding that displaces a major system failure—such that ...

Selling the Wind
April 06, 2015
Would someone please tell the Guaraní of Guaraqueçaba in Brazil that their land is now a carbon “offset”? That’s ecological jargon for “get the hell out.” The Guaraní aren’t alone, either. Some of the Earth’s lowest carbon footprints are being wiped out in the ...

Absent Reason
April 02, 2015
Bowe Bergdahl was once a hero. Long before federal prosecutors announced last week that they were trying the former prisoner of war on charges of “desertion” and “misbehavior before the enemy,” and prior to last year’s oddly controversial prisoner swap with the Taliban ...

More Bodies for “Never Forget”
April 01, 2015
Watching the NCAA tournament Friday night at a bar in New York’s West Village, I found myself staring at an American flag pinned to the wall. The World Trade Center, lately rebuilt, loomed about one-and-a-half miles away, its well-lit spire tumescently patriotic at 1,776 feet ...