Category: Books

American Gulag
by Chase Madar | Jun 17, 2014 | BooksWe like to think of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as nasty aberrations from American justice, but what if they’re more or less par for the course? When I was at Gitmo a few years ago covering the trial of a 15-year-old captured on the Afghan battlefield, it came out that the kid’s interrogator had […]

Machine Politics
by Samir Chopra | Apr 1, 2014 | BooksAs Barack Obama was being inaugurated, he stood on a red and green carpet. That bright accompaniment, welcoming those come to see a progressive sworn in—ostensibly to further a liberal agenda—was manufactured by a Koch brothers subsidiary, INVISTA, which had won the contract to provide carpeting for the quasi-monarchical presidential ceremony. It would be […]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being CIA General Counsel
by Scott Horton | Mar 1, 2014 | BooksIn the months following 9/11, it seems Washington just couldn’t say “no” to the CIA. The agency’s budget shot through the ceiling. Suddenly the CIA not only commanded private armies, it even had a state-of-the-art air force! Between 2006-2007, the CIA drove a proxy war, mobilizing Ethiopia’s army to invade Somalia. It was perhaps […]

More to News Than Newspapers
by Marc Cooper | Feb 1, 2014 | Books, MediaTo paraphrase Desi Arnaz, American journalists “have a lot of esplainin’ to do.” How is it that in this media-marinated era, where more information is more available to more people than ever before in history, so many can be so massively misinformed? How is it that so many can ignore the cold science of […]

Books that Shaped Work in America
by Kathy M. Newman | Jan 28, 2014 | Books(Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle) I teach American literature and media history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and for many years I have taught a course called “Capital Fictions”—a class in which we examine the ways in which literature shaped, and was shaped by, the US economy at the turn-of-the-last-century. Though I never […]
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Editor’s Picks
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By Will Novosedlik
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By Anne Nelson
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Keynes to Democrats: Major Government Infusions Needed to Rescue this Economy
By Steven Pressman
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By Barbara Koeppel
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By Anne Nelson
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Holding Democracy in the U.S. Hostage
By Anne Nelson