Tag: Keith Gessen

Love and Money: On Keith Gessen’s “A Terrible Country”

The title of Keith Gessen’s new novel is A Terrible Country, but the novel is less about a country than a city: Moscow. Not just Moscow as a city in its own right, though the city is very much a character in the novel, but the experience of Moscow by an American millennial, Andrei Kaplan, a 30-something academic in flight from his failures in Brooklyn, failures of love and work, family and friends. A Terrible Country, in other words, is the anti-Brooklyn novel. If the Brooklyn of the public imagination is the place where young intellectuals move to make their lives among writers, journalists, academics, and artists, public lives that happen out of doors, in parks and readings and rallies and talks […]

Reminder: Talk tonight with Keith Gessen, and Wednesday night with Eddie Glaude

Just a reminder… Tonight (Monday), I’ll be talking with Keith Gessen about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at 7 pm at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street in Manhattan. On Wednesday, I’ll be talking with Eddie Glaude about The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be be talking at 7:30 pm at Dweck Center in the Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. I hope to see any and all of you who live in the NYC area either tonight or Wednesday night. And if you come, please make sure to say hi. And make sure to buy the new edition. It’s already gotten its first review and there are more to come.

Upcoming Events in LA and NYC with Keith Gessen and Eddie Glaude

I’ll be doing several speaking events in Los Angeles and New York City. On Tuesday, November 7, I’ll be delivering the E. Victor Wolfenstein Memorial Lecture at UCLA. The title of my talk is “White State, Black Market: The Political Economy of Clarence Thomas.” The talk will be at 6 pm in the Charles Young Grand Salon in Kerkhoff Hall. On Monday, November 13, I’ll be in conversation with Keith Gessen, a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at 7 pm at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street in Manhattan. On Wednesday, November 15, I’ll be in conversation with Eddie Glaude, William S. Tod Professor of Religion and […]

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election…

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election, I notice an uptick in two types of commentary. First, there’s a focus on the barrenness of Trump’s legislative record. It really is astonishing, and something we can forget amid the day-to-day sense of crisis, but compared to every modern president, Trump’s achievements in the truly political domains of the presidency—that is, those domains that require the assent, cooperation, or agreement of other politicians and the majority of citizens—have been miniscule. I rarely agree with Nancy Pelosi these days, but with the exception of the Gorsuch nomination (which, truth be told, was McConnell’s achievement, not Trump’s), she’s right: “We didn’t win the elections, but we’ve won every fight,” she said about the legislative […]

Keith Gessen, Joan Scott, and others weigh in on Brooklyn College controversy

My department at Brooklyn College—political science—is Ground Zero of a controversy over Israel/Palestine, academic freedom, and free speech. Early in January, we were asked by a student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, to co-sponsor a panel discussion on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). The panel features Omar Barghouti and world-renowned philosopher Judith Butler. We agreed to co-sponsor. Since then, things have exploded. The usual suspects—people like Alan Dershowitz and Dov Hikind—have weighed in; we’re being called anti-Semites, comparisons to the Holocaust are being made, and I got this lovely bit of hate mail: “Just writing to wish you and your family the worst…You are being a piece of f*cking trash, and you’re on the side of the […]

Shop Talk with John Podhoretz

While the shit was hitting the fan at Occupy Wall Street this morning, with reporters getting beaten and writers like Keith Gessen and Sarah Leonard getting arrested, I was fighting the small fight with John Podhoretz, son of Norman, on Twitter.  (D.G Myers, who kicked the whole thing off, is a blogger at Commentary.) “ @OccupyWriters—getting arrested for career advancement! RT @jpodhoretz: @alorentzen @nplusonemag I smell GQ first-person article! D G Myers November 17, 2011 12:21:21 PM EST ReplyRetweet “ @myers_dg @OccupyWriters @jpodhoretz @alorentzen @nplusonemag There are less honorable paths to career advancement. Nepotism comes to mind. corey robin November 17, 2011 1:32:09 PM EST ReplyRetweet “ @CoreyRobin How’s your book doing? Violently well? John Podhoretz November 17, 2011 1:43:28 […]