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From the Magazine

Satirized for Your Consumption
We live in an age of satirical excess. If economists were to diagnose it, they might well call it a comedy bubble. We currently have six late-night talk show hosts, all nattily clad, life-of-the-party, white-guy topical jokers—Conan, Kimmel, Fallon, James Corden, Seth Meyers, ...

Toxically Pure
Shortly before the first election of the second President Bush, Joe Bageant convinced his third wife that they should move from Oregon to Virginia. At the time, Barbara was a bored Merrill Lynch middle manager, while Joe, a self-taught intellectual with stifled literary ...

The Monk Retires
The phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement”—and that seems to be what it is now, a phenomenon—is not about a writer’s vanity, an ego grown so massive it’s like a publicity black hole sucking up limelight that might have shined warmly on other equally deserving ...

All Hail the Grumbler!
Drop the names of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, or Leo Strauss at a highbrow dinner party, and everyone will nod, and feel a bit smarter. Like many twentieth-century central European Jewish intellectuals, Arendt, Benjamin, and Strauss have played outsized roles in American ...

America’s Long Holiday
November 2014
Issue No. 26
BOOK REVIEWED Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism Harvard University Press, $35 The twenty-first century, already rich with apocalyptic glimpses of America’s decline, has been a productive era for narcissism. The condition, originally diagnosed by ...

The Endlessly Examined Life
My mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The records printed below are out of the mouths of my many caretakers; ...

Terror Cells
At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been ...

Able-Bodied Until It Kills Us
Trigger warning: People who feel it’s their right to never lift a finger may experience pain or discomfort. My first white-collar job was “coordinator” at my college’s chapter of the Public Interest Research Group—yes, PIRG, mother ship of pie-eyed campus activists. It ...

Degrees of Danger
November 2014
Issue No. 26
Update, March 17, 2015: Several critics of human rights abuse among UAE’s migrant workforce have been barred from entry or deported. It’s a growing list, and I joined it when I was stopped from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi on March 14. The airline representative told me ...

The Christ Nexus and Professor David Brat
The Tea Party’s marquee 2014 success story—the dramatic unseating of House majority leader Eric Cantor by an obscure downstate Virginia economics professor named David Brat—provided maximum symbolic value during its summer tour through the mediasphere. The pundits had ...