Am. History & Culture
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Dying Traditions in New York: The Baymen and Farmers of Long Island before WWII
The other day, I reposted Dying Traditions, which I suggest you read before this post because it provides a context for what I want to say here. I was reminded of it during my current reading of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which is a biography of Robert Moses. But it is not your run-of-the-mill biography. It is striking for its ambition
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The Disaster of 2010
From Chapter 10 in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, "The Shellacking: Dark Money's Midterm Debut, 2010" Lifting the donors' [Koch donors' network] spirits further was the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down on January 21, [2010], two days after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, and shortly before the Kochs' summit. Brown's race
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HBO’s ‘The Leftovers’: Channeling the Zeitgeist
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about over the last several years is that while the Age of Faith was supplanted by the Age of Reason, we live in a time now when most thoughtful people no longer believe in reason. Although there are still some dead-enders like Sam Harris, E.
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Even More on Torture
I don't usually talk about family stuff on this blog, but my son just started as a fellow at Mother Jones magazine last week, and he posted this piece about documents just recently released about how the US dealt with Japanese waterboarders. It's worth a read.
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Jim Sleeper on White Male Rage
White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely imagine ever happening to themselves, the white guys are reeling now because their loss seems so recent, humiliating and, to them, inexplicable. In ressentiment some of them
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Jim Webb for President
There are things that Jim Webb has said and done over the years that have rubbed me the wrong way, but better him than Hillary. He's an economic populist who is to the left of Hillary's foreign policy and someone who resides in Glenn Greenwald's Hall of Fame for integrity. That alone makes him preferrable
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Frank & Perlstein . . .
. . . take their act on the (rail)road. Great conversation about the tragedy of the 1970s in the U.S. A few excerpts: RP: Before Reagan is even elected. And then when Reagan does run for president in 1980, the secret weapon in his quiver ideologically is supply-side economics which basically breaks the back of
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Election Day
Significance of GOP victory deserves a thought or two. The bottom line is that our democracy has become so hollowed out and most people so alienated that what we're watching is simply a street fight between factions in the country's power elite. For some it has entertainment value, but it's not even an interesting matchup
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Awakening to Adulthood
Not much time lately to think or write–or read. But I was struck by A.O. Scott's piece in yesterday's NYT Magazine entitled "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture", and by Andrew O'Hehir's thoughts about it today in Salon. There is much in both pieces, but these paragraphs in O'Hehir's piece gets to the nub:
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Quote of the Day: Cornell West
I think a post-Obama America is an America in post-traumatic depression. Because the levels of disillusionment are so deep. Thank God for the new wave of young and prophetic leadership, as with Rev. William Barber, Philip Agnew, and others. But look who’s around the presidential corner. Oh my God, here comes another neo-liberal opportunist par