January 7, 2022
The book sometimes resembles a competent white noise machine.
An online-only review of books and arguments about books.
January 7, 2022
The book sometimes resembles a competent white noise machine.
December 20, 2021
Did Eggers mean to write an op-ed, instead of a novel?
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December 9, 2021
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas
December 6, 2021
He was a Black nationalist sympathizer who advocated for integration and a reformist who argued for revolution.
September 20, 2021
Revising Said’s “out of place” self-image is a project worth pursuing further
Although Brennan’s book prioritizes Said’s English-department dramas, his longstanding anti-militarism is arguably at least as interesting a thread to follow, and one that seems destined to stay interesting longer.
May 10, 2021
How did the revolutionaries of 1989 become the nativists of the 2010s and 2020s?
Migration shapes nativist politics, but does not suffice to explain the wider crisis of liberalism. Exclusionary policies on immigration are being pursued in most European countries (with some notable exceptions, such as Portugal). Yet despite general anti-immigrant sentiment, it is only in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Hungary that nationalist governments have actively turned away from the European Union, and only in Budapest and Warsaw that open season has been declared on liberal civil society and the rule of law. Kaczyński and Orbán are special among Europe’s nationalists not for their chauvinism, but for their authoritarian actions against domestic opponents and the EU.
March 24, 2021
What’s the matter with left-populism?
The New Deal is the ultimate horizon of Frank’s political imagination. In the 1930s, Frank argues, the Great Depression finally forced the American ruling class to rethink its unabashed elitism, leading inevitably to the rediscovery of the virtues of the populist tradition. The New Deal was at its heart, then, a cultural and rhetorical phenomenon with downstream economic consequences. He devotes orders of magnitude more attention and detail to poets like Carl Sandburg (whose epic The People, Yes gives the book its title), filmmakers like Orson Welles, and the oratory of FDR at his most fire-breathing than to the substantive economic policy of the President and his postwar successors. Frank even quotes, approvingly, labor secretary Frances Perkins’ remark that the New Deal was “basically an attitude.”
March 11, 2021
At the heart of the new age are novel configurations of fear, certainty, and power
The big reveal: Google and Facebook are marketing companies. That is how they make money. What is more extraordinary is how much the two companies have thus far dominated their markets. Zuboff reports that between 2012 and 2016 Google and Facebook together accounted for 90 percent of the growth in global advertising expenditures. But there is nothing much “unprecedented” about advertising.
March 5, 2021
Red Pill’s Blue Lives
February 9, 2021
Robert M. Gates and America’s forever foreign policy
The more time one spends in Gates’s head, the more one is struck by the increasingly nihilistic quality of the American exceptionalist creed. Gates and his ilk remain committed to the idea that when there are problems in the world, the United States must “do something.” What is that something? It usually doesn’t matter much.
January 18, 2021
Process issues loom large in shaping the rules of the game, even if most voters aren’t paying attention.
June 1, 2020
A horizon of maximum difference, a test bed for linguistics and for linguists
New Guinea remained on my radar: a horizon of maximum difference, a test bed for linguistics and for linguists. Elsewhere, linguistic differences usually stem from geographic isolation. But in much of New Guinea the diversity is actually deepest in places where travel is easiest. Instead of using religion, clothing, or food, Papua New Guineas have distinguished themselves above all through language. Call it tribalism or, as linguists do, the “constructive fostering of variegation” through “intentional language change.”