Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. More…
The first sign of trouble was a tweet: [at]mcduh: [at]questlove sayin he saw hundreds of riot cops on South St, Manhattan bout 1hr ago. #occupywallst [at]DiceyTroop are yall aware of anything? I immediately crossed Broadway on the south side of Liberty, side-stepping dormant traces of ongoing street maintenance and responding: [at]mcduh [at]questlove all quiet at the Park. What did you see questo? Maybe Batman stuff? More…
I say mystery is the only certainty/ That embracing nothingness/ as hard as you did those big/ bear arms around the dissipating void/ so all the stars squeezed out the sides/ you made Nietzsche look/ like the crybaby punk/ he actually was infected with syphilis/ and so forth who said god/ is dead and remains dead and we/ killed him talk about/ Oedipal guilt, which you/ spat out like an apple’s/ arsenic pit More…
Joe Paterno, football coach, liked to talk about the Aeneid. He gave speeches about heroism and the Aeneid as early as the 1970s. It’s a central motif of his autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, and as recently as 2007, Paterno told GQ that the Aeneid has “probably had as much influence on me as anything in my life.” More…
Even before Liberty Plaza was raided, many of us were asking what was next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement, we said, was about more than holding a space, even one in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. Occupation, I often heard, was a means, not an end; a tactic, not a target. The goal, from the beginning, was to do more than build an outdoor urban commune. More…
In New York, word was that Brooklyn and Queens were over. The next neighborhood was Wall Street. Friends, acquaintances, and people I’d only read about online were all relocating to a nice park with nice sleeping bags and tents, but they never had time for me, they never wanted to go to the movies or grab a drink, they were Occupied. The cops showed restraint. The cops showed no restraint. More…
For the first five weeks, the Wilmington, North Carolina General Assembly met on benches under a pavilion in Greenfield Lake Park, a public property just south of downtown where signs warn passersby not to feed or tease the alligators. I’d heard that at least 100 people had attended the first GA on October 8. But when I showed up on a Saturday afternoon in late October, there were only six or seven people present. More…
The New School needed to improve its financial situation and its status, and it was going to do it, like any New York institution, through real estate. They were going to tear down one of their old buildings and replace it with a state-of-the-art gleaming sixteen-story tower, home to studios for designers and artists and laboratories (for whom, no one could tell you). More…
For five days last month, Tahrir Square felt like a war zone. Half of the streetlights had stopped working, probably knocked out by projectiles launched by the riot police, making the side streets dark except for occasional blue flashes from an ambulance. The sound of protesters beating against sheet metal storefront shutters was pierced intermittently by the whistle . . . crash of fresh tear gas canisters. More…
In this episode Liz Hynes talks with Chad Harbach about his new novel, The Art of Fielding, exploring themes of mimetic desire, Herman Melville, and male friendship on and off the baseball field. More…
It takes confidence to sit in front of an audience, wearing clothes you may have slept in, using your rubbery face as your primary prop, to discuss warmly but ultimately damningly, for nearly two hours, a man you never met. A man thought of as a rare contemporary hero. A man who died five weeks earlier. What gives Mike Daisey the confidence and endurance is, I suspect, justice. More…
It’s been said many times that Hitchens tended to “personalize” politics, to think in terms of character and friendship rather than structure and movements. That seems true, but also incomplete. My sense of him as a writer was that, like a poet, he loved certain rhetorical and musical effects much more than others, and he wanted from his journalistic occasions above all opportunities to produce those cherished effects. More…
Surely a contrarian who remembered writing this, while now enjoying the lavish hospitality of Vanity Fair and the Hoover Institution, would feel irresistibly tempted to remind the latter that the society they are dedicated to protecting from radical criticism is a crass plutocracy, and the former that nobody is more covetous and greedy than the rich rabble whom they celebrate from month to month? More…
