Category: Culture
Hotheaded, Flat-Footed & Powerful
by Scott McLemee | Feb 15, 2012 | Books, CultureIt actually makes journalism sound fairly enticing. It’s a gross overstatement, though. Most working reporters I’ve met have been very conscientious in exercising whatever little clout they wield. Become the foreign-affairs columnist for one of the world’s leading newspapers, though, and all fetters are off. The only limits that remain are those of the imagination, as Thomas […]
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 […]
Bad Faith Documentary
