As Lawrence Lessig explains in Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It (TWELVE, 383 pp., $26.99), the disastrous nibble for American democracy was the change in the relationship between money and power. It may not have been a fall from Eden, but it was a headlong descent from the […]

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Dwight Macdonald (1906–82) represented the first best example of a critic who could do productive, even transformative, things going in one direction while everyone else went another. Skeptical spectators and aspiring smart alecks drew encouragement not only from Macdonald’s conscientious objections, but from their method. He could twist the dial from “sarcastic” to “sardonic” with a compound […]

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It’s been ten weeks since, on September 17, a few hundred pioneers plunked themselves down in Zuccotti Park (more a patch of sunless concrete than a park, actually), renaming it Liberty Square and turning it into a sort of communal homestead and visible sore spot, reminding those who needed reminding that the wildness of markets […]

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Building a State “The state of Palestine has to be built. And if we Palestinians do not do it, who is going to do it for us?” Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — September 23, 2010 After Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad concluded his talk at the New America Foundation‘s Washington offices, a […]

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Talking Back to My TV—On December 14, Fox News Network’s Glenn Beck returned to a story that he and his colleague Sean Hannity had been working since July: that White House Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren is an advocate of forced sterilization and compulsory abortions. Holdren was director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy […]

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