I don’t have a problem with the idea that what wins in New York City is not the same as what wins in Iowa, that the US is a big country with all kinds of diversity, etc. But when I read an article in the New York Times like this—so prominently featuring a photograph like this—I don’t see Iowa, or what a moderate Democrats needs to do to win in Iowa. I see an Upper East Side Jewish guy’s idea of what a moderate Democrat in Iowa looks like and needs to do. Ben Rhodes, who wrote the article, grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, got an MFA at NYU, was so mobilized by a sense […]
For Americans my age or older, Ravel’s Boléro will always be the music of Blake Edwards’ film “10,” which came out in 1979. Starring Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, the romantic comedy introduced Bo Derek, she of the braids and breasts, to the world. Thanks to Bo and Blake, Boléro came to be associated with sex of the pure fucking sort, so much so that Allan Bloom singled the music out for criticism (along with “rock ‘n roll”) in The Closing of the American Mind. More innocent times, those were. Last night, at the New York City Center, my daughter and I saw Boléro performed as a ballet. A ballet is what the music was originally commissioned as, but it’s […]
Ashley Parker, a journalist in DC, posted the comment I’ve screenshotted below on social media. Read her post carefully and remember that the person who wrote it is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a veteran reporter of the New York Times and the Washington Post, has won a Pulitzer Prize, and is now a writer at The Atlantic and an analyst at MSNBC. Parker has hit all the familiar markers of status and success in an industry where is not so easy to succeed or acquire status. She’s obviously smart and skilled. She’s not a conservative. She’s more of a vacant lot, a person whose profession is devoted to words yet pays little attention to her own, […]
Donald Trump this morning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” New York Times tonight: “One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?”
I’ve been working for months on a review of Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a monster of a book—more than 1300 pages, with notes and the index—and I’ve had trouble writing my way into the review. When I write, I label each draft with a number. If I’m writing an article, the first draft is Article 1, the second Article 2, and so on. I put a date on each draft, too, to remind myself when I started the draft. In this review, my Article 1 has a date—October 11, 2025—and then a blank page. Which means I circled around and around the piece for months and wrote nothing that I could even keep. Then the […]
My big decision for the coming new year: I’m getting off the electronic calendar matrix. I’ve always disliked the technology. I’ve finally decided to act upon it. Being a late adopter of the smart phone, I’ve never gotten used to looking at the electronic calendar the way I used to look to my paper planners. Before the electronic calendar, I simply kept my paper planner on my desk, next to my wallet and keys, and it was the first thing I looked at in the morning, and would take with me whenever I went out of the house, along with my wallet and keys. Then came the electronic calendar, and try as I might, I still have not developed the […]
I appreciated this conversation between Ahmed Moor and Peter Beinart over Beinart’s decision to speak at Tel Aviv University, in violation of BDS, and then, in the face of a lot of public and private criticism, including from people who are close to Beinart, his very public reconsideration and apology for having done so—and then the backlash to his apology. That backlash to his apology is coming from two different sides, from people who are anti-Zionist, who claim that Beinart is just doing damage control to preserve his brand, and people who are Zionist, who say he was forced to grovel before a political inquisition of the left. I have to say that Beinart does an extremely good job of […]
The Hindu, one of the larger newspapers in India, interviewed me about Zohran Mamdani. I spoke at length with Meera Srinivasan, who’s based in Sri Lanka, and was able to give some of my most extensive thoughts on the significance of Mamdani’s campaign and victory, for the left in the United States and beyond. Srinivasan and I spoke about Mamdani’s abilities to bridge the divides of class and identity, the failures of centrism and the Democratic Party, and how Mamdani builds on a legacy of immigrant socialism from the early twentieth century. Have a listen.
The Washington Post, which still runs that increasingly self-parodying banner “democracy dies in darkness,” has an article on the new US citizenship test, which the Trump administration has re-designed to make it longer and harder. From here on out, every journalist who happens to get an interview with any member of the administration, or, hell, with any politician, should be obligated to ask that person at least three of these questions. To see if they get them right. Back in the 1990s, during the heyday of communitarianism, Katha Pollitt ran a wonderful little experiment, where she asked leading academic communitarians what sort of community activities they had engaged in during the previous month or so. The results were clarifying. Beyond […]
I found this a most unbelievable passage, in a New York Times article about why tech and other professionals who are worried about affordability are turning to Mamdani: They ruled out the other candidates for a range of reasons. Some cited concerns about the sexual harassment complaints against Mr. Cuomo and the corruption investigation into Mr. Adams and his administration. The charges against Mr. Adams were dropped, but some in his orbit have remained under investigation. We all know, and the Times itself reported on it intensively and extensively at the time, that the Trump administration dropped the corruption charges against Adams back in February because of a promised quid-pro-quo: if the government dropped the charges, Adams would cooperate with […]
After the killing of Charlie Kirk—as everyone now knows—Ezra Klein made the following two claims: If the following media reports are correct, one of those two claims cannot be true. Reuters: After the fatal shooting of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, U.S. Republicans have a warning for Americans: Mourn him respectfully or suffer the consequences. At least 15 people have been fired or suspended from their jobs after discussing the killing online…The total includes journalists, academic workers and teachers. On Friday, a junior Nasdaq employee was fired over her posts related to Kirk. Others have been subjected to torrents of online abuse or seen their offices flooded with calls demanding they be fired, part of a surge in right-wing rage that […]
Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over to the Trump administration to help with the federal government’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus. Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components more clearly. Since February, Trump’s Department of Education has been investigating universities, including Berkeley and other UC campuses, for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In March, the Justice Department announced a separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses. In July, a House congressional committee called three university leaders to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the summoned was the chancellor of […]
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Categories
Education, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State, Violence
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Tags Brooklyn College, CUNY, Ellen Schrecker, James Milliken, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of California, Zohran Mamdani
My wife and I saw the new Leni Riefenstahl documentary this weekend. Compared to the documentary from the early 1990s, “The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” the new one falls short. Though stylishly made, it doesn’t break much new ground, and in certain ways, fails to do what the earlier documentary did: Explain why people are so fascinated by Riefenstahl in the first place. The first documentary devotes a good chunk of the film to explaining how pioneering were Riefensthal’s techniques, how innovative her approach to film and propaganda. It’s only by appreciating her filmic achievements that we can wrestle with what a monster she was. The original film quotes her saying something to the effect that people are […]
I love magazines like The Atlantic. Ever since its editors first heard murmurings of a possible victory by Zohran Mamdani, the magazine has been running one anti-Mamdani article after another, with titles and claims like these: But now, having lapped this one field of propaganda, the magazine has decided to launch itself on a different course. On today’s website, I read a lengthy attack on the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization from which Mamdani hails. Pining for the days of Michael Harrington—when the organization had 7% of the membership it has today—the magazine declares that the problem with DSA is that it is not more like Mamdani, who knows how to build bridges, turn windy ideology into plain talk, […]
My last post, on cringey academic posting, generated a lot of debate on Facebook. In the course of that conversation, we got into a discussion about self-promotion of our work on social media, and why people are so anxious/apologetic about doing it. As I said on Facebook, I don’t really understand the anxiety about self-promotion. And that’s not because I have no anxieties about drawing attention to myself in real life. I do. Big time. I come from a big family. It’s always been hard to get a word in edgewise, when we’re all together, which as a kid, growing up, was every day. My tendency ever since has been to withdraw and watch. But writing is very different for […]
Why do academics and journalists and writers need to announce their professional good news or that of a friend or colleague or department with these cringey “amid the dark times, a bit of light” introductions? If you think these are dark times, the fact that a journal just accepted your article—or a publisher signed a contract for your co-edited anthology or your friend is now the dean or a favorite writer just got hired by a magazine—well, you can’t really believe any of this illuminates the darkness. Can’t you simply tell us your good news and trust that we’ll be happy for you without our having to run it through the cash register of the universe to see whether and […]
Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]
One of the elements of the current moment that has made me most depressed is not its novelty but its familiarity, its recursion to a kind of politics I thought we were moving past. For many of us on the left—and I’m being ecumenical in my usage here, including everyone on the left left to more liberal and mainstream Democrats—the case of Abrigo Garcia is a straightforward human rights atrocity, which needs to be fought tooth and nail. If you read the press, the right and the media are using this story to reprise a very familiar game that the right knows all too well how to play, pitting the security and safety of ordinary Americans against those crazy proceduralist […]
Politics, they say, is about making hard choices. And none seems harder right now than whom to vote for in the New York City mayoral race. According to the New York Times, the top two fundraisers in the race are Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo. It’s true that Mamdani is overwhelmingly getting his money from small donors, which is good, while Cuomo is getting his money from the big wigs. Including Jessica Seinfeld, who, last I heard, was giving thousands of dollars to a pro-Israel group that beat the crap out of pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA. But, as the Times notes, there are other issues of concern about both candidates. On the one hand, there’s this: Andrew Cuomo, who resigned […]
After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]
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Categories
Jews, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Brooke Gladstone, fascism, HUAC, Humphrey Bogart, Mahmoud Khalil, McCarthyism, Michel Martin, Muskism, NPR
Many people of my generation have heard of Bill Safire, who worked as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew. When I was growing up, Safire had long departed the Nixon White House. He was now a columnist for the New York Times—perhaps the first in what is a by-now familiar sequence of the Times’ hiring voices who could speak for the “reasonable right” on its oped page. Like William F. Buckley, Safire liked to style himself a man of words, and his columns were often peppered with painful pedantry and middlebrow mewling (I can do alliteration, too!) over the rules of proper usage, the etymology of words, and such. So let’s do some here. Despite […]
A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook: As the last three days’ events around the failure of the Republicans and Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right. I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painfully, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget. But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that […]
I did a lot of writing this year. This is a brief list of some of my favorites. My book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, came out. It got some pretty great reviews. You should buy it. I began writing for The New Yorker Online, which has been a joy. My first piece was on political converts, men and women who make the journey from one ideology to another, and why the move from left to right has mattered more, over the course of the last century, than the move from right to left. My second piece was on Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist and a historian, and how his failure at the first made possible his success at the second. […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Law, Media, Race, The Left, The Right
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Tags Adam Smith, Alex Gourevitch, Clarence Thomas, Hayek, Jodi Dean, Max Weber, New Yorker, Obama, Vivian Gornick
My piece on the Historovox has provoked a lot of controversy and pushback. Dan Drezner devoted a column to it in The Washington Post. Others have weighed in on social media. I had a chance to talk with Bob Garfield of the NPR show On the Media about the piece. Have a listen.