Free to Choose? Free to Choose?
How Americans have become tyrannized by the culture’s overinvestment in choice.
Jun 3, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sophia Rosenfeld
The Best Years of Their Lives The Best Years of Their Lives
Why World War II offered Hollywood directors an escape into reality.
Jun 3, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Noah Isenberg
Favorite Hallucinations Favorite Hallucinations
Did Chris Marker think history to be not only an infinite book but a sacred one?
May 21, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Floats Like A Vulture Floats Like A Vulture
Instead of rescuing forgotten truths, neocons like Charles Krauthammer devise novel fallacies.
May 21, 2014 / Books & the Arts / George Scialabba
Good Enough? Good Enough?
The amount of affordable housing in New York City is shrinking, and Mayor de Blasio’s development plans might not reverse the trend.
May 21, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Michael Sorkin
Entertainment Companies Get $1.5 Billion in Tax Breaks Each Year—Yet They’re Offshoring Musicians’ Jobs Entertainment Companies Get $1.5 Billion in Tax Breaks Each Year—Yet They’re Offshoring Musicians’ Jobs
Currently, 39 states and Puerto Rico subsidize the entertainment business to the tune of about $1.5 billion. Yet many of these agreements lack concrete mandates to direct how compa...
May 14, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece? Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece?
With its lack of art and absence of thought, the blockbuster Norwegian novel disappoints.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / William Deresiewicz
What Was Democracy? What Was Democracy?
Democracy was once a comforting fiction. Has it become an uninhabitable one?
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk
Mugwump Mugwump
O beggar, bigwig, mugwump —W.H. Auden If you got to look it up, don’t use it. A pity since we’ve all known one, guy checking time cards, signing requisitions, woman working her way center stage of my worries. Every decision she weighs, I’m on the balance, the bigwig. Turns out, as from the mess of history because the Algonquians had no clue about Imperator and Centurion and seeing no way to excise dominion and ranks from the account, giving Caesar what’s Caesar’s so to speak, and Antiochus the Seleucid’s also, John Eliot, to let his catechumens into the kindling of the lord, his Praying Indians in Natick, Ponkapoag, Lowell, rendered the smug of sovereign, war-lord, arrayer in a single Wampanoag word, come down as Mugwump, dated but still chiefly American in its broad-brush picture of the nothings who oversaw our stints at register or sink, or the guy tightening the dirndl strap on barmaid or mid-level manager and CEO too. They’re fine, I figure, with our menial seasons, the bosses seeing us cross over—shrugs of resignation—v from knuckle down to knuckle under and since acquaintance with the eternal requires no minutiae, lives by mass or matins, Mugwump serves their kind right.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sebastian Agudelo
How Tolerant Should We Be of Intolerance? How Tolerant Should We Be of Intolerance?
It’s one of the most ticklish questions of liberal philosophy.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Cathy Gere