By the spring of 2008, nine months after the first iPhone reached the trembling hands of the American consumer, Steve Jobs had grown so suspicious of Google’s nascent Android project that he took an unusual step: He personally traversed the six miles from Apple’s central command in Cupertino to Google’s Mountain View headquarters to hold a meeting with the wizards of the great global search engine on their turf.
John Foster Dulles (left) and his brother, Allen, 1956. John Foster Dulles was a dullard and a prig. “He was driven to find and confront enemies, quick to make moral judgments, and not given to subtlety or doubt,” the former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer writes in his new biography of the Dulles brothers. […]
Justice for African Americans is as elusive as the pea in a shell game, where appearances of fairness are so finely spun that they make the victim seem complicit in the exploitation.
With a nod to Elmore Leonard, Bad Paper seeks a bit of love for certain bad or not-so-nice people—the hundreds of debt collectors, some of them ex-cons, who chase down little old ladies on Social Security to cough up their last pennies to pay off the money they borrowed from the likes of Bank of America or Chase. But the marks—who also include the jobless, the mentally ill, and, yes, sometimes, people like you and me—aren’t really paying off the banks. No, the banks long ago sold off these debts to debt buyers like the heroes of this picaresque nonfiction
A century ago, a woman who wanted to prevent or terminate a pregnancy had to exercise ingenuity. If she was fortunate, her partner could afford condoms (and was willing to use them), or she could buy a device called a Mizpah pessary, a proto-diaphragm sold under the guise of “womb support.” More commonly, though, women douched with Lysol after sex, or, under more desperate circumstances, swallowed turpentine water, poked themselves with knitting needles, rolled down stairs, or hit their abdomens with a hammer.
For most of American history, progressives have not loved the Supreme Court. Four years before the Civil War broke out, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that white settlers’ slaves were protected “property” under the Constitution—a status that would, in Taney’s view, forever prohibit African Americans from becoming citizens of the United States. In the early twentieth century, the court struck down minimum-wage laws and other protections for workers. The Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of the laws,” adopted in 1868, had no application to women until the 1970s. An interpretation of equal protection gave the country the pernicious “separate
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is the work of Jeff Hobbs, a close college friend of the book’s subject, and large chunks are told from his perspective. But if the story has an audience-identification character—someone who asks the questions you’re asking and thinks the thoughts you’re thinking as Peace moves inexorably toward his sad demise in the basement of a drug stash house—it’s Oswaldo Gutierrez, another of Peace’s friends from Yale, who is, as Peace was, a native of Newark.
As this review was going to press, the latest bout of hostilities between Hamas and other Gaza-based militants and Israel had become even more bloody and destructive than 2009’s brutally named Israeli incursion into Gaza, Operation Cast Lead. An estimated 1,700 people have been killed. Between 70 and 80 percent of them were Palestinian civilians, and at least 200 were children. Israel has so far attacked seven UN schools serving as refugee shelters, provoking harsh condemnation even from the United States. Meanwhile, Hamas has drawn criticism from the global community for using abandoned schools to store ordnance. Sixty-four Israeli troops
When President Barack Obama announced a sustained campaign of drone assaults on strongholds of the militant isis (Islamic State) faction in Iraq and Kurdistan, pundits tended to categorize the move as a limited, one-off maneuver. The idea was to contain the spread of isis influence in northern Iraq, and to aid some 40,000 Yazidi Kurds under siege from the group on an isolated mountain. Obama himself stressed that “there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq”—and as if to prove him right, the Iraqi government quickly descended into a political crisis, as a newly appointed prime minister,
I was in Los Angeles setting ancient Confucian odes to music when a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teen named Michael Brown. I earn a living editing a major African American newspaper in Saint Louis, which means that I have to be on guard, at all times, for breaking news affecting our community. Ferguson is right in our backyard. This was our story.
As I monitor the images and information streaming from Ferguson, Missouri, I can’t help thinking of the novelist Charles Baxter’s observation about writing fiction: “If you want a compelling story,” he has advised, “put your protagonist among the damned.” Pictures, some from gifted photojournalists like Scott Olson and Lawrence Bryant, others from fearless amateurs with cell phones, give us glimpses of what hell might look like: smoke, sulfurous fumes, shadows, screams, and volatile armies clashing by night. In the United States right now, there may be no more compelling story than the violence and unrest erupting in a humble heartland
This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year-old self . . . about the kinds of things I wish someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college. I was like so many kids today. . . . I went off to college like a sleepwalker, like a zombie. College was a blank.” That’s how William Deresiewicz begins his blistering, arm-waving jeremiad against Ivy League colleges and their dozens of emulators, which are creating a caste that is ruining itself and society.
In a cartoon that earned him a Pulitzer Prize, Bill Mauldin shows two men at hard labor in a Soviet gulag. “I won the Nobel Prize for literature,” one tells the other. “What was your crime?” In 1958, when the cartoon was published, it was obvious that the hapless Nobel laureate was supposed to be Boris Pasternak, whose literary achievements earned him expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and harassment so unnerving it pushed him to the verge of suicide. “It is not seemly to be famous,” a poem by Pasternak begins. “Celebrity does not exalt.” Yet after the
How do we define the corruption that money brings to our politics? It’s easy to be vaguely concerned about “money in politics” in the dollar-saturated public sphere that’s risen up following 2010’s Citizens United and subsequent federal-court decisions. Many people are. But the “corruption” that’s taking place now isn’t as simple as some would make it seem, and its complexity contributes directly to its power and endurance.
Ruben Castaneda may be the nicest crack addict in the history of the drug. His worst transgression seems to be missing his brother’s wedding-rehearsal dinner: He couldn’t tear himself away from his pipe and the strawberry (as a young woman who traded sex for rock was known, back in the proverbial day). He also, in the grips of his disease, began to call people near and far saying he’d lost his wallet, and showed up for work disheveled and reeking of booze.
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May 31
Ordinary words can undergo strange transformations when they are used in politics. Outside of its economic context, the word austerity connotes something stern, bleak, undecorated, pared back to its elements. But the whole concept of cutting government programs during a recession—in other words, precisely when people may need them the most—seems not just strict but […]
Peter Waite, Union Carbide Board Room, 1995, acrylic on aluminum, 20 x 30″. Once upon a time, a half century or so ago, America’s corporate leaders—an ethnically homogenous, conservative group of guys—routinely mobilized for the sake of progress. Moderate and pragmatic, they formed important coalitions that helped improve public policy and advance vital national goals. […]
