Occupy Wall Street’s march against police brutality, New York City, September 30, 2011. The preamble to the US Constitution boldly asserts a claim of popular sovereignty. The document declares itself the work of “We the People.” This claim, as many historians and others have pointed out, is a mystification: Insofar as ours is a democratic […]
Anand Giridharadas’s The True American operates on the seemingly provocative question of who is more American: the Bangladeshi air-force officer who immigrates to Dallas, hires on as a gas-station cashier, and dreams of working with computers; or the Bud-swilling, tatted, truck-driving, meth-blasted Texas peckerwood who shot him as “revenge” for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Which man more encapsulates the true core of American ideals? And, really, what are America’s post-9/11 ideals? Is our place in the pecking order of social status in this country somehow mystically predetermined, or do we really choose who we become? These are the high-concept questions
One of my favorite moments in Cubed, Nikil Saval’s lush, funny, and unexpectedly fascinating history of the workplace, comes in a chapter called “The Birth of the Office,” in which the author describes the insane yet rampant “efficiency” craze that began to sweep the nation in 1900. One of its outgrowths was a periodical called System, subtitled A Monthly Magazine for the Man of Affairs. “Each volume,” Saval writes, “had articles proposing new models for the minutiae of office life, whether a new system of filing or a more efficient mode of envelope licking.” (In 1929, the magazine changed to
It’s hard to believe, but just five years ago one could still make a good living by pontificating about the growing chasm between the experts and the amateurs. Who cares today whether we can trust Wikipedia? Or—to take what seemed the most burning question of the last decade—whether bloggers are journalists? That particular debate has petered out for reasons that are primarily economic rather than philosophical: The contemporary consensus seems to be that if your “content” attracts “eyeballs,” you will probably have a job in the media business. Whether you call yourself a blogger or a journalist is no longer
President Barack Obama meets with (from left) Representative Barney Frank and Senators Dick Durbin and Chris Dodd in the White House Green Room, June 17, 2009. It’s hard to know what to make of the 111th Congress. On one hand, it was a Congress of immense productivity. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, for example, […]
Caricaturist Charles Philipon’s sketch of King Louis-Philippe as a pear, 1831. Most people who worked at The Nation in 1984 would probably not have disagreed with the proposition that Henry Kissinger had, metaphorically, screwed the entire world. But when then-editor Victor Navasky wanted to run a cartoon depicting him doing just that, he faced a […]
Napalm bombs explode during a live-fire exercise, 1984. “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning.” The bomber crews that dropped napalm on Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, “gagged and vomited” in the sky over the burning city. The paint on the bottoms of their planes blistered from the heat. On […]
Adolf Hitler with jackdaw, Obersalzberg, Germany, n.d. The last sixty years have witnessed a steady stream of critiques targeting intellectuals for supplying rationales—on either a direct or indirect basis—for the brutal totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Even as the specter of overt totalitarian rule has faded, European intellectuals have continued to trade charges […]
I grew up in a house that was once my grandfather’s butcher shop. My father tells stories about playing near buckets of slick and glassy cow eyeballs in the back room, with sawdust on the floor and lambs hanging upside down in the store window. At that time, a butcher was on every few blocks in my Queens neighborhood—the shop was one of two that my grandfather ran along with his brother. In the 1960s, supermarkets moved in and put most of the butchers out of business. Why bother going to a specialty meat store when you could have precut,
Western Marxism, like capitalism, operates on thirty-year business cycles. Ever since the First International, in 1864, approximately every third or fourth decade has seen a Marxist renaissance. At the turn of the twentieth century, in the turbulent 1930s, in the malaise-ridden 1970s, and now in the second decade of the 2000s, the specter of Marx has come back to haunt us. As Marx wrote of the reaction that put down the 1848 revolutions, the “ghost walks again.”
The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point.
Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax. Non-closure is at the end of this excerpt: collection, which fills more than 40 boxes, was almost too intimidating to even broach.1187576
Let’s imagine you wanted to instant message with someone in a completely secure way. You don’t want the National Security Agency to listen in, and you don’t want a company like Google scooping up and analyzing your words so it can tailor ads to you. How would you do it?
I don’t like it when books I love are turned into movies. I’m a teenager at heart, which means I’m ferociously protective of the images and moods I conjure up while reading a book. I don’t like that imaged sullied by some development executive at Dreamworks trying to revive Katherine Heigel’s career. But for reasons I haven’t quite figured out, my affection for Donna Tartt’s work demands a cinematic treatment. It could simply be that Tarrt writes boys and men so well. And I like watching mischievous boys and craggy men acting on screen.
It is the unfortunate fate of many women of a certain period to be recalled not as individuals but as “flappers,” a word that seems, to modern chroniclers, a nearly irresistible invitation to a morality tale. A woman of the 1920s might refuse domesticity without consequence; a flapper, on the other hand, will burn brightly for a time before descending into the kind of callow, knowing narcissism that completes a particular narrative arc. We know many of these stories by heart: Zelda Fitzgerald fell into madness, and Tamara de Lempicka into obscurity. Tallulah Bankhead was a drunk, Josephine Baker never
I haven’t attended the Cairo International Book Fair in years. My guide during my return to the fair this January was a staggeringly cultured middle-aged Egyptian friend. He’s an autodidact who remembers first haunting the bookstalls and surreptitiously skimming pages when he was a penniless ten-year old, and the fair (and Cairo), was the uncontested epicenter of Arabic literature. Back then, the event was held in the upper-class island district of Zamalek; today it occupies fair grounds in Nasr City, a suburb built in the 1960 to provide cheap housing for army officers. It is also the neighborhood where supporters
These days the island of Más Afuera—five hundred miles west of Santiago, Chile—may be known only as the place Jonathan Franzen went to spread the ashes of David Foster Wallace, as recounted in a 2011 essay in the New Yorker. But in March 1800, Amasa Delano, a ship’s captain from New England, arrived there hoping to fill his holds with sealskins. Sealing, like whaling, was a profitable new industry in the early nineteenth century, and Delano had already failed at whaling. He wasn’t the only one with such dreams. When Delano arrived at Más Afuera, there were fourteen other ships
I spent the last ten days devouring everything by novelist and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, the sole author behind HBO’s magnificent True Detective. I got hooked on Pizzolatto’s writing within moments of finishing the first episode of this bleak, philosophical, and wry new mystery series about two cops investigating a serial killer in rural Louisiana.
One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp was a magpie doubling as a prophet. He dabbled in Dada, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Surrealism, all to great effect. His work prefigured postmodernism and deconstruction, Pop and conceptual art, and he undertook what can be seen as the longest ever piece of performance art by pretending for decades to have quit art-making to play chess (he was playing chess, but he was also secretly making art).
In Young Money, Kevin Roose investigates why young people still seek jobs on Wall Street even after the crash of 2008 revealed it to be a seeping moral gutter. Roose, a writer for New York magazine, is something of a specialist in reporting on publicity-averse subcultures. In 2009, he published an undercover account of student life at Liberty University—the sprawling evangelical college that the late Jerry Falwell founded in Lynchburg, Virginia—after attending the school for a semester. Here, he employs a similar technique—but instead of enlisting for Wall Street duty himself, he reports on the experiences of eight young people
