Category: Culture
It’s a Dry Heat (and Getting Hotter)
by Osha Gray Davidson | Feb 1, 2012 | Books, Culture…as William deBuys demonstrates in his wonderful new book, A Great Aridness. DeBuys, an accomplished New Mexico writer and conservationist, understands that a lack of water is what gives this iconic landscape its impossibly blue skies and unique wildlife. But life in these arid lands is a precarious affair. Death or even extinction is never more […]
After the Fall
by Geoff Rips | Dec 15, 2011 | Books, EconomyAs 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 […]
Sophisticated Kitsch and Mac Attacks
by Gene Seymour | Dec 1, 2011 | Books, CultureDwight 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 […]
At the Onset of Winter, Questions for a Bullish Movement
by Todd Gitlin | Dec 1, 2011 | Culture, EconomyIt’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 […]
If You Build It They Will Come | Making the Middle East Pay
by WS Editors | Oct 15, 2010 | Foreign Policy, MediaBuilding 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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Editor’s Picks
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Dancing in the Dark: Steps to Avoid a Constitutional Coup in the 2024 Election
By Mark Medish and Joel McCleary
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The Wide Angle: Is a UFO Hoax a Ticking Time-bomb for Biden?
By Dave Troy
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How Christian Nationalists, Big Oil and the Big Lie Seized the Speaker’s Gavel
By Anne Nelson
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By Art Levine
From the Editor’s Desk
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Listen to “Paranoia on Parade”, a 3-part audio podcast with commentary from author Dave Troy, Jack Bryan, director of the 2018 film “Active Measures," and Hamilton Fish, Editor of The Washington Spectator.