What’s Ahead in the ‘Voting Wars’? Certainly Not Peace What’s Ahead in the ‘Voting Wars’? Certainly Not Peace
A conversation with election law expert Richard Hasen on the true scope of voter fraud, the power of the ACORN myth and John Roberts’s scary interest in the Voting Rights Act...
Aug 17, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Brentin Mock and Voting Rights Watch
Bill Moyers: For Campaign Cash, TV Gives Back Nothing Bill Moyers: For Campaign Cash, TV Gives Back Nothing
The campaign season earns local television stations enormous sums of money. What should they give back?
Aug 14, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Laura Flanders
Citizen Vidal Citizen Vidal
As an elegant essayist and critic of empire, Gore Vidal had no peer. Oh, how the Republic misses its persistent suitor!
Aug 8, 2012 / Books & the Arts / The Editors
Mitt Visits Foreign Lands Mitt Visits Foreign Lands
(And not to hide money) The Mittster, while taking a three-nation swing, Showed talent for saying the very wrong thing. He teed off our English friends lickety-split; The tabloids in London town called him a twit. Apparently having no motives ulterior, He seemed to be calling the Arabs inferior. In English and Arabic venom Mitt bathed. ’Twas only in Poland he came out unscathed. His trip, meant to show foreign-policy cred, Because of Mitt’s gaffes was a model instead Of what not to say when abroad one doth roam. So here’s the consensus: he should have stayed home.
Aug 8, 2012 / Column / Calvin Trillin
Fatherland: On Héctor Abad Faciolince Fatherland: On Héctor Abad Faciolince
Oblivion re-creates the life of one of the many innocent victims of the Colombian conflict.
Aug 8, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Jorge Volpi
From ‘The Split’ From ‘The Split’
Had you entered the thicket in darkness, had the brambles been swiping your face as you passed, had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis, had you no other lens but damage to gaze through, had you—thwacked by branches—entered your true love as your true love cried out with her palm on your face, her heel on the small of your back in the darkness, you might have removed the mask from your visage, the glass from the casement, the scythe from your fist. * We were just two drunk kids parallel parking in the dark, you saying, Are you the one with the low down? Under the burnt-out street lamp us kids. Heron coasted by the house, trailing those long legs. No, never tasted heron meat. Dawn: through the Lincoln Tunnel the mammals and their metal, headlighting 42nd Street. By the way, you weren’t born in Omaha. You said your wife changed her clothes at the wedding site because it was too cold in the car. I heard your anecdote, I learned what was an event to you.
Aug 8, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Susan Wheeler
The Reaches of Stringency: On Philip Larkin The Reaches of Stringency: On Philip Larkin
Self-congratulation, deceptions and the art of failure.
Aug 8, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood
Daylight Answers: On ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Daylight Answers: On ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
A massacre in Aurora and the cinema of social hallucination.
Aug 8, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Chris Hayes Gets Called ‘Media Elite’ by Stephen Colbert Chris Hayes Gets Called ‘Media Elite’ by Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert took Hayes to task on his show, holding up Hayes's book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.
Aug 6, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Press Room
Hail and Farewell, Gore Vidal Hail and Farewell, Gore Vidal
I don't feel sad for Gore Vidal today. If anything, I feel sad for my country, which lost one of its truest patriots.
Aug 1, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Peter Z. Scheer