(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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In 1920 the New Republic ran “A Test of the News,” a special supplement to the magazine (published soon after as the book Liberty and the News) by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz showing that in the three and a half years since the Bolshevik revolution, the New York Times had reported “not what was, […]

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If you visit the website of Nottoway Plantation, a resort hotel, you’ll see a photo of a half-dozen people dressed in antebellum finery. It’s a plug for Nottoway’s new mystery theater evening: The actors play members of the Randolph family who built the property. Or rather, the family that forced others to build it for […]

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  The United States of Paranoia is witty, smart, and more than a little subversive. Ranging confidently through history and popular culture—from the Indian wars of Puritan New England to Andrew Jackson assassination conspiracy theory and the deconstructive tricksters behind Discordianism’s Operation Mindfuck, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to Jack Chick’s Evangelicalist comic books—Jesse […]

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(Richie Incognito, left, and Jonathan Martin | Source: press pool) I admit it. I’m fascinated by the Jonathan Martin/Richie Incognito controversy. At first, I was drawn in by Incognito’s name. Was it real or an amazing alias a la Carlos Danger? Since then, I’ve listened to speculation on what made the offensive tackle leave the Miami […]

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