Lewis Lapham | The Nation

The death of American exceptionalism—and of me.

With overfishing, acidification and garbage-ification, the seven seas aren’t what they once were.

Are our relations with the animal world going the way of the great auk?

The unwinnable war transforms a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state.

Election politics today are little more than advertising. But it wasn't always that way. 

Magic and the making of an American political culture.

The Internet as a toy with a tin ear and a wooden tongue.

A person can only eat so much, but the craving for money is boundless—the purse, not the belly, is the void that is never filled.

The news media these days look to outperform one another in their showings of concern for the lost battalion of America’s unemployed. Consult any newspaper, wander the Internet or the television talk-show circuit, and at the top of the column or the hour the headline is jobs.

Celebrity messiahs have come to redeem our country, not govern it (and don’t forget Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie O and Diana and Oprah and Brangelina and David Hasselhoff).