Rick Perlstein is the author of, most recently, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980, as well as 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 best seller 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.
How worried should we be that the de Blasio transition was aided by pals of the Walton Foundation and assorted other 1 percent creeps?
More on the national security web site Lawfare and its solicitation of sponsorship from defense contractors like Northrop Grumman.
Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution loves the National Security Agency and takes money from Northrop Grumman to blog about it in The New Republic.
What does a publicly traded corporation do when its defense-contracting business is flat? Move more aggressively into the privatization of city services.
Chicago’s commitment of almost half a billion dollars to privatize its transit fare collections sweated greed from every pore—and it doesn’t even work.
If you’re a liberal, a politician working to deny his constituents government-subsidized healthcare is immoral. If you’re a conservative, it’s the most moral thing in the world.
Professors just don’t get why graduate students deserve labor unions, revealing a dangerous myopia about how academia works in the age of austerity.
How a propaganda goof by Richard Nixon’s administration midwifed an urban legend that scarred American foreign policy and domestic politics for a generation.
It’s bad out there on Thanksgiving this year. A remembrance: in 1973, it was worse.