Selected Salvos

Father Worship
Peter Manseau Issue No. 32
Two years before he was shot in the chest, and two centuries before he became an unlikely pop icon, Alexander Hamilton wondered how religion might be used to win elections. Suggesting that politics could not… Read More »
Time Bandits
Rick Perlstein Issue No. 32
I love my readers. But not unconditionally. You may know my work: over the last two decades I have written a series of books on the history of American conservatism since the 1950s. The tale… Read More »
Material Issue
Jackson Lears Issue No. 32
Since the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we have seen the resurgence of a Victorian economic ethos, tight-fisted and pusillanimous. Whether tricked out in the technocratic jargon of neoliberalism or the truculent bromides… Read More »
Village Atheists, Village Idiots
Sam Kriss Issue No. 32
Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world… Read More »
Madam Prescient
Jessa Crispin Issue No. 32
It was not, at one time, considered so remarkable that a candidate for the United States presidency talked to the dead. That the candidate was a former prostitute and an advocate for free love was… Read More »
Small Worlds
Chris Lehmann Issue No. 32
When will America get its shit together? No, I don’t mean by this the sort of rhetorical plea that readers expect as a matter of course in journals of opinion—be it the calls for banking… Read More »
The Higher Happiness
George Scialabba Issue No. 32
In the Feminist Hall of Fame, there are a few places for men. Near the entrance, in the Mary Wollstonecraft Room, there’s a bust of William Godwin, her husband. The author of A Vindication of… Read More »
Pity, O God, the Republican
Susan Faludi Issue No. 31
“Nobody will protect our Nation like Donald J. Trump. Our military will be greatly strengthened and our borders will be strong. Illegals out!” —Donald Trump, on Twitter, @realDonaldTrump, March 26, 2016 A balmy evening in Budapest,… Read More »
The Slippery Slopes
Ola Morris Innset Issue No. 31
As historic sites go, Mont Pèlerin is a far cry from Normandy, Waterloo, or the shores of Tripoli. The town that became known as the birthplace for the wide-ranging revolution in economic and social thought… Read More »
Our Friends who Live Across the Sea
Astra Taylor Issue No. 31
A bronze, life-size male figure carrying a suitcase mounts a massive set of stairs to a jetliner that does not exist. He is slightly hunched, frozen mid-step. Whatever the statue was initially intended to signify,… Read More »
The Naked City
Melissa Gira Grant Issue No. 31
It was 1994, I was sixteen years old, and I was taking two trains each day to get to the remnants of a neighborhood Bostonians of a certain age still called “the Combat Zone”—the onetime… Read More »
Delusion at the Gastropub
Heather Havrilesky Issue No. 31
It takes a lot of high-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better… Read More »
Knock Yourselves Out
Ben Schwartz Issue No. 31
From 2012 to 2015, one of our most reliable national punch lines was Bruce Jenner. Husband, then ex-husband, of Kardashian reality-show matriarch Kris Jenner, Bruce Jenner had not yet come out as a trans woman,… Read More »
Despair Fatigue
David Graeber Issue No. 30
Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness? There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue. For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly… Read More »
The New Man of 4chan
Angela Nagle Issue No. 30
“The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,” announced one commenter last year on the giddily offensive /r9k/ board of the notorious, anarchic site 4chan. “This is only the beginning…. Read More »
Against Activism
Astra Taylor Issue No. 30
Almost a decade ago I attended a conference called “1968” at a nondescript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned community college math instructor living out his retirement in New Mexico, delivered… Read More »
The Rest Is Advertising
Jacob Silverman Issue No. 30
Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Notorious for keeping its communications department locked up tight, Twitter is not only the psychic… Read More »
A Not-So-Golden State
Andrew J. Bacevich Issue No. 29
The Library of America is to literature what Cooperstown is to baseball—a sort of Valhalla created to immortalize this country’s finest writers. And like the storied traditions of our national pastime, the handsome… Read More »
The Bully’s Pulpit
David Graeber Issue No. 28
In late February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a… Read More »
Cable News Charnel
Alex Pareene Issue No. 28
The reason we are showing you this,” the grave news anchor says, “is to bring you the reality of Islamic terrorism and to label it as such.” The anchor is Fox News’s murine-faced Bret Baier…. Read More »
Cyborg Soothsayers of the High-Tech Hogwash Emporia
Corey Pein Issue No. 28
One cool morning last fall I followed a canal from my hostel in Amsterdam to the chic DeLaMar Theater. The theater was once a Big Data archive, a custodian of the records of a Nazi… Read More »
More Titillated Than Thou
Ann Neumann Issue No. 28
Peering out from a wire rack in a grocery store was a religious vision of sorts: a paperback romance novel that neatly summed up classic yearning, confining cultural norms, and the hazards of defiled purity…. Read More »
Three Strikes! [1]
Lucy Ellmann Issue No. 27
[1] In baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Out on your ass. The expression therefore has some bearing on the trajectory of this article, my pitch being that men are swinging wild. The original idea… Read More »
Purple Reign
Chris Lehmann Issue No. 27
When the great granddaddy of opinion journals, The New Republic, abruptly vanished in a sad, squalid burst of pixel dust and management theory last winter, establishment journalists rent their garments and gnashed their teeth in… Read More »
The Taming of Tech Criticism
Evgeny Morozov Issue No. 27
BOOK REVIEWEDThe Glass Cage: Automation and Us, by Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton, $26.95 What does it mean to be a technology critic in today’s America? And what can technology criticism accomplish? The first question… Read More »
Satirized for Your Consumption
Ben Schwartz Issue No. 27
We live in an age of satirical excess. If economists were to diagnose it, they might well call it a comedy bubble. We currently have six late-night talk show hosts, all nattily clad, life-of-the-party, white-guy… Read More »
America’s Long Holiday
Suzy Hansen Issue No. 26
BOOK REVIEWED Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism Harvard University Press, $35 The twenty-first century, already rich with apocalyptic glimpses of America’s decline, has been a productive era for narcissism. The condition, originally diagnosed by… Read More »
The Endlessly Examined Life
George Scialabba Issue No. 26
My mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The… Read More »
The Crowdsourcing Scam
Jacob Silverman Issue No. 26
In 1968 a Norwegian science fiction writer named Tor Åge Bringsværd published a peculiar short story called “Codemus.” The story has achieved the kind of retrospectively prophetic quality that makes sci-fi such a useful imaginative… Read More »
The Dads of Tech
Astra Taylor, Joanne McNeil Issue No. 26
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously said, but let Clay Shirky mansplain. It “always struck me as a strange observation—even the metaphor isn’t true,” the tech consultant and bestselling… Read More »
Soak the Rich
David Graeber, Thomas Piketty Issue No. 25
This exchange is from a conversation in Paris between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, discoursing on the deep shit we’re all in and what we might do about climbing out. It was held at the… Read More »
Dallas Killers Club
Nicholson Baker Issue No. 25
© Michael Duffy There were three horrible public executions in 1963. The first came in February, when the prime minister of Iraq, Abdul Karim Qassem, was shot by members of the Ba’ath party, to which… Read More »
Slumming It
Daniel Brook Issue No. 25
In a speech to the financial elite of India delivered in Mumbai in 2010, president Barack Obama opted for an unusual form of flattery. He saluted “all the Mumbaikars who get up every day in… Read More »
The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan
John Summers Issue No. 24
Ever since Mark Zuckerberg reappeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 and announced that this old city had growth potential after all, the region’s public officials have been eagerly positioning themselves to ride a wave of… Read More »
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
David Graeber Issue No. 24
My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in… Read More »
Hoard d’Oeuvres
Rhonda Lieberman Issue No. 24
When you’ve got the big house, and you’re driving a Jaguar, what differentiates you from every asshole dentist in the Valley? Art was a way for Eli to distinguish himself. —Shelley De Angelus, Eli Broad’s… Read More »
The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke
Anne Elizabeth Moore Issue No. 24
Thirteen-year-old Milly Dowler, a perky schoolgirl from Surrey, England, never intended to be the undoing of mighty News Corp. The global media conglomerate—famously helmed by expat Australian Rupert Murdoch—had, in Dowler’s day, owned or held… Read More »
Feminism for Them?
Susan Faludi Issue No. 24
To those casually acquainted with the bad-boy bohemianism of Floyd Dell, the literary radical and “prose laureate of Greenwich Village” may seem an example of the idealist who is better at theory than at practice—like… Read More »
Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not
Susan Faludi Issue No. 23
The congregation swooned as she bounded on stage, the prophet sealskin sleek in her black skinny ankle pants and black ballet flats, a lavalier microphone clipped to the V-neck of her black button-down sweater. “All… Read More »
All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go
Ann Friedman Issue No. 23
In a jobs economy that has become something of a grim joke, nothing seems quite so bleak as the digital job seeker’s all-but-obligatory LinkedIn account. In the decade since the site launched publicly with a… Read More »
The Meme Hustler
Evgeny Morozov Issue No. 22
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used… Read More »
Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism
Heather Havrilesky Issue No. 22
While we are still recovering from the trauma that finance capital has inflicted on our public world, a late-capitalist fairy tale manages the pain in the more private and intimate reaches of the sexual daydream…. Read More »
The Long Con
Rick Perlstein Issue No. 21
Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board… Read More »
The Missionary Position
Barbara Ehrenreich Issue No. 21
Most critics have regarded Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in much the same way that Arthur Miller probably thought of Marilyn Monroe—gorgeous, but intellectually way out of her depth. No one denies the film’s visual glory, which… Read More »
Dead End on Shakin’ Street
Thomas Frank Issue No. 20
My hometown is vibrant. Its status as such is certified, official, stamped on both sides. There was a time, though, when it wasn’t, when my friends and I would laugh at Kansas City’s blandness: its… Read More »
Dilemmas of the Rentier Class
Chris Lehmann Issue No. 20
Washington, D.C., teems with many brands of delusion, but for true connoisseurs of the flight from consensual reality, there’s a special joy that comes with reading the Washington Post’s sober commentariat weigh in on the… Read More »
Party of None
Chris Bray Issue No. 20
In real life, the balls were rushed and exhausting for the Obamas to attend. They danced ten times to the same song, “At Last” by Etta James, hearing the same lyrics over and over. But… Read More »
Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard
Jim Newell Issue No. 20
On December 23, 2011, the dons of Harvard University finally got to see Adam Wheeler sentenced to a year in prison. Wheeler, a twenty-five-year-old whom they admitted in 2007 on the strength of an academic… Read More »
Too Smart to Fail
Thomas Frank Issue No. 19
The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no… Read More »
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
David Graeber Issue No. 19
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard… Read More »

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Selected Salvos

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