Reviewed: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman (Harper, 464 pp., $27.99). Wear at least three “gender-appropriate” garments to the bar or risk a police bust. Get booted from the Army for loving a consenting adult. Marry your beloved and keep paying the IRS as though you were single. The spectrum of humiliations and civil […]

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In “A Brodner Minute,” illustrator-animator Steve Brodner‘s series of satirical videos for The Washington Spectator, Brodner twits everyone in his path. No one is safe—from Rudy Giuliani to Mitt Romney, Arizona governor Jan Brewer to fatcat donors, Grover Norquist to Newt Gingrich. Below, Spectator interns Annie Jones and Renae Lesser ask the artist a few questions about his work. AJ: You studied fine […]

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Reviewed: Land of Promise: An Economic History of The United States, by Michael Lind (Harper, 592 pp., $29.99). America is fickle. Or at least our economic history is. According to Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise, we can’t make up our minds about the role of the federal government in the economy, and the result […]

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Reviewed: Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $26). We associate Victorians with plenty of moral codes and few women’s rights. But as Kate Summerscale meticulously documents in Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace, there was more afoot in the era than its rigid outward manners would suggest. At […]

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Reviewed: Metro: A Story of Cairo by Magdy El Shafee (Metropolitan Books, 112 pp., $20). Magdy El Shafee is a Libyan-born Egyptian comics artist. In 2008, his first graphic novel, Metro: A Story of Cairo, was published in Egypt. It recounts the fictional adventures of a down-on-his-luck, quasi-superheroic software designer who angrily roams the streets and subway (the Metro) of Cairo. The […]

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