April 2011

From Boston Review: Ships as far as the eye can see. The rising sun glittering on the Aegean. Wind rippling the sails, water lapping the bows, fear, excitement, vengeance, glory, the favor of the gods, the order contemplated, the order given. Or, expressed differently: Since obviously under any analysis...

Yves Jeanmougin Translation and introduction by Suzanne Ruta Le Quotidien d’Oran is one of Algeria’s most widely read French language dailies. People say they buy it just to read Kamel Daoud’s page three chronique or column, Raina raikoum, (my opinion, your opinion). In a country where the lone TV station...

The Kitchenware-Revolution, Austurvöllur square, Reykjavik From Mediapart: Jorgen Jorgensen, a Danish adventurer who died in the wilds of Tasmania in 1841, is, as a result of his various misadventures, a laughing stock in his native land. However, one of this prolific writer’s exploits did have irrefutable panache. In 1809...

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% | by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Vanity Fair

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a...

From The American Prospect: Around 1950, Americans began to see signs of a new kind of discontent. A generation of young rebels started popping up in fiction and films — Holden Caulfield, the characters played by Marlon Brando and James Dean — who were fleeing from or revolting against...

The Lion Gate at Mycenae From The Smart Set: Amongst ruins, there is a mood. Wordsworth captured an aspect of that mood in his poem “Tintern Abbey”: And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While...

Dr Urbanus From Le Monde Diplomatique: One evening in November 2005, as Gary Mitchell sat on his sofa at home in a Belfast suburb, watching Rangers play Porto on the telly, he heard his wife shout from the kitchen: “They’re on top of the car!” Then, she shouted, “They’re...

From The Chronicle Review: Apart from the patently nonreality-based dissent of its Republican members, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission could hardly have expected the report it issued in January to arouse much excitement. After a year and a half of research and the testimony of academics and other economic...

by Martin Paul Eve The two, alternate titles proposed for my recent work are “The F Word” and “Whose Line is it Anyway?” The word in question is Foucault, as in Michel, and the “Line” is Pynchon’s, as in Mason & Dixon. The cursory glances that have been afforded...

Lula's Brazil | Perry Anderson

London Review of Books

Contrary to a well-known English dictum, stoical if self-exonerating, all political lives do not end in failure. In postwar Europe, it is enough to think of Adenauer or De Gasperi, or perhaps...