Category: Books
Seeing Like a Burglar
by Jonathan Tarleton | May 19, 2016 | Books, PoliticsPhoto Credit: USGS Architectural determinism has a strange effect: under its auspices, behavior is attributed to brick and mortar. Towers sow violence and destitution, either by creating irresistible opportunities for crime or structuring life in such a way that social contracts continually rupture. The argument is at once both a perverse scapegoating and a peculiar […]
Back to the Dark Side: Dick Cheney’s Pax Americana
by Ambassador Joe Wilson (ret.) and Valerie Plame | Oct 22, 2015 | Books, Foreign Policy, PoliticsExceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition. “The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the […]
Right-Wing Doublespeak and the Long Con
by D.R. Tucker | Oct 19, 2015 | Books, PoliticsBefore I read Arthur Brooks’s The Conservative Heart, I wondered if he chose that title because Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul (HarperCollins, 2006) was already taken. After reading this odd work, I wondered if he chose that title because American Hustle was too accurate a description. Brooks, the head of the right-wing American Enterprise […]
A Celebration of Black Heart and Intellect
by Cyrus Cassells | Jun 15, 2015 | BooksGregory Pardlo is a poet of joyous variety and wonder. It’s clear from the lively and anthem-like opening poem, “Written By Himself,” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Digest, that he’s as wide-ranging, humane, irrepressible, and inclusive in his snappy 21st-century fashion as fellow urbanite and trailblazing singer Walt Whitman: I was born in minutes in […]
You Can’t Make the Congress Do Anything
by Scott Lemieux | Mar 1, 2015 | Books, CultureThe United States is a separation-of-powers system within which the chief executive has substantially less power over domestic policy than, say, a British prime minister. Despite this, legislation passed by the United States Congress tends to be associated very strongly with the president who signed the bills. The Affordable Care Act—addressing what has been […]