Express
Man, What a Show!
By Theodore HammSeptember was one helluva ride. It came in with a hurricane that blew the president and vice president off the RNC stage. In their place stepped a hockey mom who knows how to field-dress a moose.
Making Our Votes Really Count
By Nicholas JahrAs term limits and elections loom—with much of the current City Council scheduled for eviction in 2009—Mayor Bloomberg (along with more than a few members of the council) has indulged in an achingly long flirtation with the idea of repealing the limits that stand between him and a third term.
Up in Smoke
By Paul MattickAs recently as early September we were being reassured, not only by politicians but by experts everywhere, from the halls of academe to newspaper financial pages, that—serious though things might be—comparisons to the Great Depression were uncalled for. By the official end of summer, as I am writing this, that comparison is everywhere, if only as background for insistence that this time the downward spiral can be controlled—provided that the government does the right thing, and does it fast.
Campaign Dispatches: St. Paul and Beyond
By David Levi StraussWho says we can’t afford another big election about small things? Isn’t it the little things that matter most? Like Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy, and her mother’s big gun? Like John McCain’s age and Barack Obama’s secret Muslim heart?
A Letter from Alf Landon
By David Levi StraussI received this letter from Alf Landon when I was fifteen years old, in Kansas, in 1968, after I’d written to him to complain that political party conventions were outmoded. Landon had supported Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1922, and was elected governor of Kansas in 1932, serving as a very popular moderate-to-liberal Republican, and gaining a reputation for cutting taxes and balancing the budget.
Call Me Naive: A Love Letter
By Alex Gallo-BrownI know I’m supposed to be cynical about Barack Obama. The political process is broken, the cynics say, crushed by three decades of Republican rule, undermined by a stupefied—or stupid-fried—electorate, and sabotaged by a media industrial complex the likes of which Dwight Eisenhower could never have imagined.
A Life in Underground Letters
By Williams ColeBarney Rosset is the publishing legend responsible for the seminal Grove Press and the highly influential cultural journal Evergreen Review. Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Beckett, Che Guevara, Genet—these are just some of the books and authors that Rosset published in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, many for the first time in the country.
Crawling through the Wreckage
By Vincent RossmeierTom Frank is a well-respected journalist and Wall Street Journal columnist, whose 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? gained notoriety for positing that Republicans had duped those in the Red States to vote against their economic interest in favor of hot-button social issues like abortion and gun-control.
A Blueprint, or a Green One?
By Leigh Kamping-CarderThomas L. Friedman is the anti-Cassandra. Unlike the figure from Greek mythology, his warnings are never prescient, but they are always heeded—if one judges by bestseller lists and dinner party chatter. Friedman’s last prophecy arrived in 2005, when he introduced globalization to the masses.
The Journalist as Private Eye
By Katie RolnickIn the introduction to Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine, that magazine’s editor, Roger D. Hodge, argues that the turn of the millennium and George W. Bush’s administration signaled a shift in both the way we consume information and the type of information we’re receiving.
Souls of Arab-American Folk
By Jessica Loudis“But what exactly is a profile?” Moustafa Bayoumi writes at the outset of How Does It Feel to be a Problem? “It’s a sketch in charcoal, the simplified contours of a face, a silhouette in black and white, a textbook description of a personality. By definition a profile draws an incomplete picture.”
Diamonds in the Rough
By James ArnettOnce in an undergraduate class on American literature, one of my classmates noted that our teaching assistant had referenced The Simpsons during the discussion of nearly every text we had read. The student was not a fan of the show and was somewhat irritated that a prime-time cartoon frequently infringed upon our debates over Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Melville.
Andrzej Wajda: An Auteur from the East
By Alan LockwoodOn October 17, the Film Society of Lincoln Center opened “Truth or Dare,” a month-long Andrzej Wajda retrospective. The 82-year-old director introduced four features over the first three nights: The Promised Land (1975), Everything for Sale (1969), Ashes and Diamonds (1958), and Katyn (2007). Wajda (pronounced VY-da) is among cinema’s great living auteurs, and he spent decades cannily steering script proposals and finished works past Poland’s communist-era censor bureau.
