Summer 2020
One Hundred Seconds
At what feels like an apocalyptic moment, the nation that has always claimed to play a uniquely redemptive role in world history has suddenly been recast in a different mold. In the richest country on earth, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have turned out to be peculiarly catastrophic. For once, America can truly claim to be exceptional. No other nation is facing as dire a combination of medical and economic calamities Read more...
Summer 2018
Invisible Inheritance
1968 is back. Its fiftieth anniversary has produced a flood of books, articles, memoirs, even performance art. The dramatis personae in these narratives rarely vary: along with the inescapable public figures there are recurring representatives of the restless young—the SDS, the Yippees, the self-styled Maoists, the devotees of Che. I seldom see myself or anyone I knew in these accounts, though I turned twenty-one in 1968 and was profoundly affected by the events of that era. Read more...
Winter 2018
War and Forgetfulness
In the contemporary United States, as in most modern societies, collective memory is always under construction. The contributors to the project are academics, journalists, politicians, business executives, media professionals, and other public figures who have access to institutions with the power to disseminate ideas about the past. They create narratives that purport to explain how we became who we are. This requires selective remembering and systematic forgetting. Read more...
Spring 2017
Hobson's Choice
Donald Trump embodies a rogues’ gallery of cartoonish figures: the confidence man, the master of misdirection, the buffoonish big shot, the demonic clown. But he is a clown with a semiautomatic assault weapon. In pursuing terrorists, his predecessors in the White House have provided this president with the tools to pursue executive tyranny. Trump is up to the job; his temperament is oligarchic rather than managerial. His explosive mix of appetite and impulse makes him an embodiment of license. He gives a green light to eruptions of anger that menace the least powerful groups in our society. There are innumerable reasons to challenge his reign, but what seems most menacing to me is Trump’s eagerness to strengthen and deploy the militarized police state that has been emerging alongside the “war on terror.” Read more...
