‘Illiberalism’s history is America’s history’

“American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view,” writes Steven Hahn in a NYT column that condenses the arguments from Illiberal America, which I reviewed a couple days ago. America, as William S. Burroughs

Understanding the Biden voter

I’ve been waiting for an article about misunderstood Joe Biden voters for so long that of course The Bulwark, the site created by disaffected conservatives, had to publish it. The thing’s good.

The limits of wisdom: ‘Oppenheimer’

When Christopher Nolan remembers dialectical tension, an anguished close-up fills the screen, and, like a bow on a Christmas present, a voice-over scripted in High Sorkin-ese rewards the audience for its good conduct. Strenuously — frantically — assembled, Oppenheimer pummels the audience in the manner of a highstrung SAT prep coach. Oppenheimer is not a

Politics requires conflict

Paul Waldman makes some sense denouncing “common sense”

The New York Times’ persistent, dangerous bias problem.

The New York Times is the day’s first newspaper reading, and, after heat lightning flashes of despair, often my last.

My 2022 reading

Thanks to bachelorhood and early morning walks, I read a lot of books. Often I read too fast. Not novels or poetry — I tend to decelerate for the sake of figuring out their rhythms. This year the beneficiaries included Javier Marías, new Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, and Wolf Hall creator Hilary Mantel (her thin

November reading

“By my values,” he writes, “the thesis of this book is an American tragedy,” Jefferson Cowie writes in The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics . The forty-year period during which New Deal politics dominated American civil life, Cowie writes, happened under world-historic conditions whose consequences rattled leaders on the

Frisking about in a Bar-ba-loot suit: politics and ‘The Lorax’

“No book has a right to be on a reading list,” Jill Lepore writes in a New Yorker column:

The Dems vs. Republicans aka #bothsidesism

When I read a column like Paul Waldman’s published a couple days ago, I agree with the topic sentences but scratch my head too.

Walter Mondale — RIP

Someone with a knowledge of Minnesota politics can disabuse me of pieties, I trust. I…really have nothing bad to say about Walter Mondale. He was often right when fighting Jimmy Carter, who selected him as a running mate, empowered him like no other vice president in our history (and set the standard for every successor

The buncombe of ‘bipartisanship’

For certain bluebloods in the Beltway commentariat, a government should be as coherent, organized, and commonsensical as a Sunday column. Hence the appeal of bipartisanship. W.H. Auden, as we say, had their number. “A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to

Reading Barack Obama

Writers overestimate the erudition of politicos. Alfred Kazin, watching with amazement at the number of poets and novelists cozying up to John F. Kennedy, suggested a sentimentality at work whereby writers, shunned by mass culture, suddenly find validation when a president has memorized one of their book titles.