I spent last night tossing and turning over Dwight Garner’s review of Katie Roiphe’s latest book of essays. Garner’s praise of Roiphe’s prose is puzzling. This is a writer, after all, whose one talent is for making you like things you dislike just because she dislikes them (and vice versa); her voice and sensibility are that grating.
Corey Robin
11.29.12
Israel’s largest circulation English newspapers, the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz, have constructed an alarmingly patchy impression of the aerial bombardment of Gaza the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) waged last week.
Nina Butler
11.28.12
Whatever Spielberg says — there’s no comparing an empty-suit like Obama to a radical like Lincoln.
I thought about writing a critique of Aaron Bady’s mostly very good review of Lincoln for a long time this morning.
Connor Kilpatrick
11.28.12
Communal celebration has deep roots in human culture. Why shouldn’t the Left embrace it?
Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, gather the people together there, and you’ll have a festival.
Audrea Lim
11.27.12
Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people.
Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincoln is about Obama, we are told, or don’t need to be told.
Aaron Bady
11.26.12
The holiday season is upon us, and if you’re a Jacobin reader, you probably don’t have firm plans for Black Friday, the largest, most soul-crushing shopping day of the year. Maybe, if you’re still with your family, you’ll strike up the annual argument with your libertarian uncle.
Micah Uetricht
11.22.12
Speech in Springfield, IL June 26, 1857:
They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
Connor Kilpatrick
11.21.12
David Brooks has a roundup of young conservative voices we should be listening to. He divides them into four groups: paleoconservatives, lower-middle reformists, soft libertarians, and Burkean revivalists.
Corey Robin
11.21.12
Comrade Frase offered his thoughts on the Hostess collapse the other day, and while I have my differences with his take, that’s not what I want to talk about here. What fascinates me about the the bakery workers’ strike are all the reactions to it, and what they reveal about the worldview underlying our free market in labor.
Seth Ackerman
11.21.12
Given the origins of my blog’s name, I’ve avoided posting on Mondays. But I don’t get paid for doing this, and so this was a misbegotten impulse for the reasons I explain below.
Yesterday I heard two interviews that helpfully recontextualize some common economic arguments about money and motivation, and provide another angle on the discussion of jobs in my last post.
Peter Frase
11.19.12
Eli Friedman
Anthony Galluzzo
Seth Ackerman
Melissa Gira Grant
Mike Beggs
We don't understand libel law.
2.Our lawyers don't either.
3.We'd like to trade in PBR for champagne.
4.We won't send you a tote bag.
5.We will send you a holiday card.
6.And possibly some baked goods.
7.We're an independent leftist magazine.
8.In color.
9.With pretty pictures.
10.This is an excellent way to launder money.