Tag
Politics
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Necessary Villains: Explaining Cultural Marxism
“If Jews didn’t exist, the right would need to invent them, to act as the snake in the garden.”
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Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of …
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Thailand: The Playwright and the Junta
Everything changed with the May 22, 2014, coup, Thailand’s 12th military takeover since the end of the absolute monarchy, in 1932. This time, a …
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Terminal Whiteness
While doing fieldwork in Tennessee for his eye-opening and often harrowing new book, Dying of Whiteness, Vanderbilt University Professor Jonathan M. Metzl met Trevor. A 40-something-year-old former …
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Public Thinker: Kevin Kruse on Why Recent History Is Still History
“Historian. Author/editor of White Flight; The New Suburban History; Spaces of …
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“The Word Illegal Didn’t Make Sense Anymore”
Ten years ago, when I would ask my students if they knew any modern Italian authors—not Dante—I would occasionally get the response of “Calvino” and, more …
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Cities Run by Real Estate
After decades confined to the desk drawer of important but boring things, the minutiae of urban planning policy are now attracting some popular attention. Transit-oriented development might come up at a dinner party. Important changes to one city’s codes—say, zoning reform in Minneapolis—can make national headlines. Community benefits agreements, property tax overhauls, and the problematic…
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Goodbye to All That: The End of Neoliberalism?
For Richard Denniss, the evolution of the Australian War Memorial into a giant billboard illustrates the logic of neoliberalism, something that, he says …
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Trump Is a Liar. Tell Children the Truth.
Rich Rump is an ill-tempered “rich man” who accidentally receives Santa Claus’s pants from the dry cleaners and then refuses to return them. Featured in …
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A Just Future for Cycling?
I occupy three precarious categories: South Florida resident, humanities professor, and cyclist. The last, however, is a condition afforded to me because of …
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Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge …
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Virtual Roundtable on “The Ego and the Id”
Freud’s ideas have long been absorbed by popular culture, but what role do they continue to play in the academy, in the …
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Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront …
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Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the …
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How Can Democracy and Criminal Justice Reform Coexist?
Ending mass incarceration in America isn’t just a matter of reforming a few aspects …
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Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician …
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How Liberal Americans Sustain Israel’s Occupation
Why has the United States historically supported Israel? And should the …
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In Memoriam: Agnes Heller
Agnes Heller, the Hungarian-born political philosopher, died recently, at the age of 90. The obituaries in outlets like the New York Times, Le Monde, and Deutsche Welle have been respectful, and even …
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Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and …
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Trump’s “Radio Machete”
This year, Rwanda commemorates the 25th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi. Americans would do well to consider the sobering similarities between the Rwandan “hate radio,” or “Radio Machete”—which helped to incite that genocide—and President Trump’s tweets. This is not to say that Trump is marching the United States toward genocide, nor that hateful…
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B-Sides: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s “My Uncle Napoleon”
In the central courtyard, in the middle of a family party, in mid-century Tehran, a fart rings out. Or was it a fart? A cat? A cat’s fart? The sound of a chair being …
