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Salvos

From the Magazine

Displaced Deities
Modernism, Jackson Lears asserts, enthroned human consciousness and “drained the vitality from the rest of creation.” The elements of the natural world—rocks, trees, rivers, and nonhuman animals—came to be seen as inert, passive mechanisms, acting only in response to ...

The Schmaltz in Our Stars
September 2016
Issue No. 32
The Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History offers Space Shows every half hour in its 429-seat Space Theater. Sealed under the mammary swell of its 67-foot screen, the viewer is invited to enjoy “a hyperrealistic view ...

Village Atheists, Village Idiots
September 2016
Issue No. 32
Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter ...

Divine Indigestion
“America is not at any crossroads,” Perry Anderson writes in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his 2015 guide to the rise and scholarly maintenance of the American imperium. Anderson is challenging Francis Fukuyama in particular, the end-of-history theorist who, ...

Madam Prescient
September 2016
Issue No. 32
It was not, at one time, considered so remarkable that a candidate for the United States presidency talked to the dead. That the candidate was a former prostitute and an advocate for free love was more worrying. What’s more, her vice-presidential pick was a former slave; that ...

Small Worlds
September 2016
Issue No. 32
When will America get its shit together? No, I don’t mean by this the sort of rhetorical plea that readers expect as a matter of course in journals of opinion—be it the calls for banking regulation and climate action in The Nation or Mother Jones, or the periodic fever ...

The Shock of the Crazed
September 2016
Issue No. 32
Art brut “auteurs” are not artists, I’m told. The champions of art brut—variously translated as “raw,” “rough,” or “outsider” art—stress that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, ...

Womb Up, America!
September 2016
Issue No. 32
Consider pistons and pumps. Sockets and plugs. Consider shafts. Cogs. Funnels. We cover the earth with stuff in the image of our genitalia. Almost every machine we produce is unashamedly coital, just one thing after another sticking out of something, or into something. And ...

The Higher Happiness
In the Feminist Hall of Fame, there are a few places for men. Near the entrance, in the Mary Wollstonecraft Room, there’s a bust of William Godwin, her husband. The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a cast-off woman with an illegitimate child and a history of ...

Black Elk, Woke
September 2016
Issue No. 32
Perhaps the prophets and systematic theologians of some future religion will adopt the phrase “American visionary” as a curse, in the same general semantic family as, say, “the world’s policeman” or “presumptive GOP nominee.” It’s certainly true that our history ...

Pity, O God, the Republican
A balmy evening in Budapest, a Saturday in June 2008. My husband and I have just finished dinner at a sleek Euro bistro (with the faux-Magyar name of Menza) and are heading along Andrássy Avenue, the city’s Champs-Élysées. The sounds of a summer night in a Central ...