When Mario Jursich and Andres Hoyos founded the literary-cultural magazine El Malpensante in 1996, Colombia's president, Ernesto Samper, had recently emerged unscathed from a series of trials revealing financial ties between his campaign and one of Colombia's most infamous and powerful drug cartels, the Cartel de Cali. The armed conflict between military, guerrilla, and paramilitary groups was reaching new violent heights and infiltrating nearly every level of urban and rural life. The country was enshrouded in an atmosphere of chaos and fear, so thorough and penetrating that a sinister new mantra soon emerged: todos los colombianos somos secuestrables—all Colombians are kidnappable. All of us: not just the wealthy and the powerful. (The world secuestrable, cumbersome in English, is succinct and correct in Spanish, and was ubiquitous at the time). This national state of fear left little space for intellectual pursuits. El Espectador, the country's oldest newspaper, had recently cancelled its Sunday magazine, which until that point had served as a lonely bastion for Colombian literary writing. Print media, television, and radio, when they weren't dedicated to covering massacres and unpunished political corruption, provided solace in distraction—beauty queens, telenovelas, soccer. Read More

The night of the Iowa caucus, I wanted to quit my job and pack a bag for Chicago or New Hampshire or wherever the action was. I didn't go to either of those places, and I put off my political wanderlust for an embarrassingly long nine and a half months, but I did end up where the action was. Though I now live in Connecticut, I grew up—and my parents still live—on what unexpectedly turned into a fault-line for the 2008 campaign: the Indiana-Ohio border.

Of the myriad people, things, and ideas that have come under assault during the last eight years we should not forget about privacy, which took a consistently harsh beating at the hands of the Bush administration. Remember finding out that back in 2002—in secret, ironically enough—the President authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communication originating within the United States. With cooperation from giants of the industry, the NSA monitored the phone calls of hundreds and probably thousands of citizens, without ever having had to show due cause for doing so.

Just as the '90s witnessed the American canonization of one important foreign writer—W. G. Sebald—the current decade has seen the same happen to the wandering novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, who spent his boyhood in Chile, his youth mostly in Mexico, and who died in Spain in 2003, at the age of 50, after a decade of Stakhanovite productivity. His massive novel 2666, unrevised at his death, is only now appearing in translation, earlier books like the monologue By Night in Chile, the tragic mockumentary The Savage Detectives, and that vicious counterfactual lark Nazi Literature in the Americas having already secured the highest praise. Bolaño's canonization has taken place so rapidly and completely, and with so little demurral, that one can only reluctantly pile aboard the bandwagon. But Bolaño is the real thing, as urgent, various, imaginative, and new as any writer active in the last decade. The question is: why not canonize anyone else? Why reserve for him the once-in-a-decade beatification? Read More

Early on Saturday morning, the weekend before Election Day, I drove down to Philadelphia with my old college buddy James to put in some get-out-the-vote work for the Obama campaign. James, a staff member for a union of service workers, was obligated to work long hours in a variety of grassroots campaign work. I had never done this before.

We showed up at party headquarters for the 33rd Ward around 9:30. This was in a vacant storefront in a downtrodden strip mall on a hill (a vantage point appropriate to the military tenor of campaign work). James hailed fellow veteran union men and women from around the northeast, all in loud Obama t-shirts with union insignia. I studied the ward map. Here in Kensington--an impoverished, post-industrial majority-minority neighborhood in the northeastern part of Philly--most of the campaign’s efforts were directed to registering and mobilizing new voters. So far there had been a groundswell. Neighbors persuaded neighbors, parents petitioned children and vice versa, spouses and lovers had nagged and pleaded with one another. There were a lot of older people at the campaign office, but a lot of younger people, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, were showing up too: grabbing coffee out of Philadelphia Eagles-branded Dunkin' Donuts boxes, stepping up as Spanish-speakers, holding doors open and giving pragmatic advice to one another. “Tryin’ to make it happen,” said one of the old ladies manning the bottled-water buckets outside.

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Here are some things I remember, from being an old person.

I remember the turnstiles in the Willie Horton ad, representative of Michael Dukakis’s commitment to releasing black rapists and murderers.

I remember the 1991 SNL skit, a fake ad against the Brady Amendment (requiring a seven-day waiting period for hand-guns), where Chris Rock and a masked accomplice rob a nice white family as they sit at home waiting for permission to buy a handgun to protect themselves. The masked accomplice ends up shooting Chris Farley, who collapses dramatically into the coffee table, and then Chris Rock says: “Nice shot WILLIE HORTON! Why’d you have to go and do that, WILLIE HORTON?”

I remember the New Yorker Talk of the Town when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out. One of Clinton’s aides was interviewed, not knowing whether the rumors were true or not, convinced (as was the case) that the Republicans, looking for one thing (Whitewater), had found something else (Lewinsky), but adding: “If you want to know who I blame, I blame Clinton. I blame him.” Read More