It’s that time of year, so I thought I’d do my own Top 5 posts of the year (my posts, that is). My criteria were various: posts I liked (even though they didn’t get much attention), posts that helped me think about new things in new ways, posts that I thought were important interventions in some larger debate.  Anyway, here they are. In no particular order. 1. When Hayek Met Pinochet: This series of posts captures what I love about blogging. One Sunday morning last summer, Greg Grandin emailed me an article in some obscure economics journal about Hayek’s involvement in Pinochet’s Chile. I printed it out, hopped on a train for a day trip to the Jersey Shore with […]

It was hard not to think of Gore Vidal’s aperçu when I read this piece on Cory Booker in the New York Times this morning. When snow blanketed this city two Christmases ago, Mayor Cory A. Booker was celebrated around the nation for personally shoveling out residents who had appealed for help on Twitter. But here, his administration was scorned as streets remained impassable for days because the city had no contract for snow removal. Last spring, Ellen DeGeneres presented Mr. Booker with a superhero costume after he rushed into a burning building to save a neighbor. But Newark had eliminated three fire companies after the mayor’s plan to plug a budget hole failed. In recent days, Mr. Booker has […]

Dear Glenn: I liked your recent post criticizing those film critics who are championing Zero Dark Thirty despite its false depiction (and implicit celebration) of the role of torture in capturing Osama bin Laden. But I think you’re going about this business of criticizing film critics all wrong. Here’s a little pro-tip I learned in my recent foray as an amateur critic of Lincoln. Apparently it’s not good form to ask a film to be something other than what it is. You can’t criticize the film you didn’t see—only the film you did see. (I know, James Agee makes a hash of that distinction, but he’s no Roger Ebert.) In your case, that means you have to criticize the criticism […]

New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has criticized the Times‘ decision not to send a reporter to cover Bradley Manning’s pretrial testimony. Good for her. Times Washington Bureau Chief David Leonhardt, however, defends the paper’s decision. We’ve covered him and will continue to do so. But as with any other legal case, we won’t cover every single proceeding. In this case, doing so would have involved multiple days of a reporter’s time, for a relatively straightforward story. The A.P. article recounting the main points of Mr. Manning’s testimony about his conditions of confinement that ran on page A3 of The Times conveyed fundamentally the same material as a staff story would have. And Charlie Savage covered his conditions of […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates is sponsoring a fascinating conversation between himself, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, and historian Kate Masur about the film Lincoln. It’s a real treat to read these three distinct and expert voices engage with each other; I’m eager to hear Kate’s response to what’s been said so far. Both Coates and Scott bring up an interesting point that I hadn’t really considered about the film: not only how it represents the Civil War as fundamentally a fight about slavery, but also how radical, even revolutionary, that is in the context of American film history. I don’t know a lot about film history, but that makes a lot of sense to me. But it also raises a […]

Dwight Garner on Katie Roiphe: Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque. George Orwell on “Politics and the English Language“: …banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation.

I spent last night tossing and turning over Dwight Garner’s review of Katie Roiphe’s latest book of essays. Garner’s praise of Roiphe’s prose is puzzling. This is a writer, after all, whose one talent is for making you like things you dislike just because she dislikes them (and vice versa); her voice and sensibility are that grating. More puzzling, though, is Garner’s prose: Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque. Set aside, if you can, the comparison to Orwell. (I know, it took me a while, too.) The sentence makes no sense. As someone more literate in physics explained to me, the only […]

One of the lines of argument about Lincoln that has intrigued me most is this one, which Will Boisvert states over at Crooked Timber: But the movie’s focus is on…snakey retail politics. That’s what makes the movie interesting, in part because it cuts against the grain of Lincoln hagiography by making him a shrewd, somewhat dirty pol. Will isn’t alone in this. I’ve seen David Denby, Anthony Lane, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Chris Hayes offer eloquent statements of the same thesis: that what makes Lincoln great is that it shows how his greatness consists in so many acts of smallness. Politicking, horse-trading, compromise, log-rolling, and the like. What’s interesting to me about this line of argument is, first, that it hardly […]

Two weeks ago I wrote, “When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German. When he makes a movie about abolition, he focuses on a white man. Say what you will, he’s consistent.” My comment was inspired by historian Kate Masur’s excellent New York Times op-ed, which argued that Spielberg’s film Lincoln had essentially left African Americans offstage or in the gallery. In Spielberg’s hands, blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group that has ravaged and ruined them. Just as Jews do in Schindler’s List. The difference is that in the case of emancipation, blacks—both free and slave—were actually far more central to the process of their own […]

As some of you know, I have created a Tumblr page. I use this for short, quick posts or little quotations that capture my attention and that I don’t want to forget. In the past, I posted these on FB or Twitter. But now I’m trying to do at least some of them on Tumblr. If you’re bored or looking for fresh  material on those days (weeks) when I’m not really posting here, you can check it out.

Because of Rosh Hashanah, I’m a little late to this story. And now that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has voted to suspend the strike, it might be moot. But still, it’s worth noting. On Sunday, the CTU voted to continue striking so that its members could have additional time to discuss and debate the terms of Chicago’s contract offer (which is still not final). You’d think that decision would have been held up as a triumph of deliberative democracy. Here you had union members demanding time and space to discuss the rules that govern their everyday lives, not waiting passively for their leaders to determine their fates. If this happened in other countries, we’d call it a Chicago Spring […]

Terry Moran makes $20-30 thousand every time he gives a talk on the East or West Coast. Two Terry talks = one Chicago teacher salary.

I was on Up With Chris Hayes this morning talking about conservatism and the GOP. For various reasons, I can’t yet embed the video here. All I can do for now is provide the links to the three segments in which I appeared. I hope to post an embedded version later.  For now, though…   Part 1: Racial backlash is in the DNA of the modern conservative movement. Part 2: The waning power of law and order as a conservative idea. Part 3: How the Democrats became the party of austerity.   Update (11 pm) I fixed the link to Part 1.

I’m going to be on Up With Chris Hayes this Sunday morning, sometime between 8 and 10. Not sure yet on the specifics, so check back in. Update (5 pm) Looks like I’ll be on between 8:40 and 9:05. But these things can change, so…

Sylvia Nasar—author of A Beautiful Mind and, more recently, Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius—was interviewed this past weekend by the New York Times Book Review. This particular exchange made my jaw drop. What’s the best book about economics you’ve ever read? The worst?  There are so many great ones, but these are exquisite: “John Maynard Keynes,” by Robert Skidelsky. “Bankers and Pashas,” by David Landes. “The House of Rothschild,” by Niall Ferguson. “Economic Sentiments,” by Emma Rothschild. “Poverty and Compassion,” by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Worst? To be worst it would have to have had a wide following, because otherwise who cares? I suppose “Das Kapital,” by Marx; “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” by Engels; and “Mein […]

My friend Connor Kilpatrick just told me the incredible news that the Cold War classic My Son John is being released this summer on video. I first learned about this film—which features Helen Hayes, an incredibly campy Robert Walker, and Van Heflin—in Nora Sayre’s fantastic book Running Time, which I also recommend. I had pretty much forgotten about the movie. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly rumors began to surface that Mohamed Atta was guy. The whole thing was so reminiscent of the plot and premise of My Son John that I had to revisit the film and write about it for a piece I did in the New York Times Magazine. It’s funny re-reading that piece now; you get a […]

It’s been a long while since our last roundup of news of the book.  So here goes…. Firedoglake held a salon about The Reactionary Mind today. Rick Perlstein hosted the discussion, lots of people chimed in. Thom Hartmann conducted an interview with me for his show Conversations with Great Minds. I certainly don’t have a great mind, but it was, thanks to Thom, a great conversation. Here’s Part I; here’s Part II. Paul Heideman has a really thoughtful review of the book here, one of the best I’ve read. Though Heideman has some criticisms, he gives a thorough account of the book’s argument. Jeffrey Goldfarb wrote an interesting blog post about the book, which sparked some more interesting discussion. Daniel […]

The blog has won another award!  Cliopatra, the history blog at the History News Network, has awarded me its “Best Writer” award.  Here’s what the judges said: Corey Robin’s new blog, CoreyRobin.com, has rapidly become a *tour de force*. Robin joins battle with contemporary issues by way of a deep engagement with the history of political thought. Although he is a passionate partisan of the left, he takes conservative thinkers seriously. Several of them have returned the favor, including Andrew Sullivan, who regularly uses Robin’s provocative posts as a launching pad for his own blogging, and Bruce Bartlett, who recently debated Robin at CoreyRobin.com. All that, and Robin’s words sparkle with a crafty combination of intelligence and wit. He is […]

I see the New York Times is still assigning book reviews to Jacob Heilbrunn.  I guess they never read this 2008 piece I wrote in The Nation. Or this follow-up from John Palattella about the same issue: Heilbrunn’s problem with acknowledging his sources and with not producing prose that doesn’t track the prose of others. Here’s what I had to say about all this in The Nation (apologies for the long quote): These are simple errors, and though one wishes that Heilbrunn didn’t make them so often or with such confidence, they don’t detract from his overall argument. The same cannot be said of the book’s two other problems. The first is that They Knew They Were Right leaves the […]

Ron Paul has two problems.  One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part.  The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism. Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support.  His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which would make any notion of human progress in this country impossible. Federalism has a long and problematic history in this country—it lies at the core of the maintenance of slavery and white supremacy; it was consistently invoked […]