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Rick Perlstein | The Nation

Rick Perlstein

Author Bios

Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications. A former online columnist for The New Republic and Rolling Stone and former chief national correspondent for the Village Voice, his journalism and essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Nation, the New York Times, and many other publications. Perlstein has been called the "chronicler extraordinaire of American conservatism" by Politico and the "hypercaffeinated Herodotus of the American century" by The Nation. He lives in Chicago, where he is at work on a book on the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan. He plays jazz piano on the side.

Articles

News and Features

As general counsel of Lockheed Martin, Comey rejected a whistleblower’s claim that a $24 billion Coast Guard project was riddled with problems. The whistleblower was right—and Comey was wrong.

A resurgent protest culture fights back against Rahm Emanuel’s austerity agenda.

The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context.

The long-running feud between moderates and conservatives is over. The wackos have won.

The continuous readjustment of expectations downward: For historians like Jefferson Cowie and Judith Stein, that was the key experience of the 1970s.

Was Patty Hearst really a rebel in search of a cause?

The conservative noise machine is coming around to support him--if it
can keep its stories straight.

A historian plugs some suspicious gaps in two revisionist histories of Vietnam.

New polling data shows that the majority of Americans are leaning liberal. How long will it take politicians and the media to get that?

China has become like Israel: No matter the party, no matter the leader, the US government will defend its actions.

Blogs

The party has always harbored conservatives and sell-outs to big business and pro-austerity boosters. The point is not to deny them, but to...
The problem of unfair and inscrutible boilerplate contracts might find its remedy in Washington or the state capitols—or we might be...
When you click on or sign an inscrutable boilerplate contract, you sign away rights. The problem is getting worse all the time—and...
From ideologue to reality-based public servant, the evolution of a fascinating man.
A surprising number of conservatives backed Rand Paul's filibuster. How much of that was sincere?
 A smoking-gun demonstration of how the formerly great reporter trims his sails according to the power politics of the moment.
Calling the sequester bluff was par for the course for a party that hates popular government programs.
When it comes to a federal right to vote, things are a little more complicated than I wrote before—but that’s not to say we...
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