A version of this column originally ran in Le Devoir on April 4, 2016. Translated from the French by John Cullen. D uring a recent visit to the Dominican Republic, I gave a lot of thought to “globalization”—a concept much discussed and much disputed in the current U.S. presidential campaign. Santo…

Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball 1. In the course of his twenty-eight years in politics and twenty more in active retirement, Richard M. Nixon uttered a great many…

Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965 by Barbara Miller Lane Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia by James A. Jacobs Robert Adams/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968; photograph by Robert Adams from his 1974 book The…

Aleksander Sochaczewski's 1894 painting depicts Poles exiled to Siberia. W hen Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, in The House of the Dead , that “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything,” he was talking about the cruelties and deprivations of life in Siberian prison camp. But the human…

MARCH 21, 2016 “IF I were a character in a novel” says Elsie, the protagonist of Hannah Tennant-Moore’s debut novel, Wreck and Order , “I would be the quintessential twenty-first-century narrator: characterized by the aimless bustle of the sharp mind, revealed through thoughts about my inner torment…

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/07/the-victory-of-ukraine/

Radical: Author Ta-Nehisi Coates has been hailed as 'the young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation' The UK publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates' first memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, follows the triumph of his second, Between the World and Me, written in the form of a letter to his young son that…

Buy Broken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power by Tom Bower Faber, 688 pp, £20.00, March, ISBN 978 0 571 31420 1 Since he left office in 2007 Tony Blair has been hawking his wares around the world, from Nigeria to Kazakhstan. What has he been selling? Himself, of course, plus his reputation, and…

The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger by Greg Steinmetz Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Augsburg, Germany/Bridgeman Images Jacob Fugger; portrait by Albrecht Dürer, circa 1520 After more than twenty years of relative neglect, the history of capitalism is once again…

Tomas Muscionico/Contact Press Images Donald and Melania Trump with reporters in the spin room after the Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas, December 2015 It appears to be happening. Donald John Trump is almost surely going to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. The man…

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/29/hideous_disgusting_racists_lets_call_donald_trump_and_his_supporters_exactly_what_they_are/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

One morning in 1970, on a day she was to speakat Emory University, Kate Millett—erstwhile sculptor, recent Ph.D. student, andnow, to her chagrin, the spokeswoman of the Women’s Liberation Movement—stoodup from the breakfast table and promptly vomited all over one of two Persianrugs covering the…

Seventy years ago this month, Albert Camus arrived in New York City. It was the first, and last, visit the author of The Stranger made to the United States. Camus spent most of his time in New York — a city, he confessed, that defeated his understanding. His experience was, in a word, absurd. To…

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair-fatigue-david-graeber

The problem of origins should not be ‘reduced to the mythical picture of a Very Large Person doing something a bit like what we normally do, only bigger’ … Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine chapel.Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis I n one of his letters, CS Lewis repeats the story of an earnest…

Buy A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West by Luke Harding Faber, 424 pp, £12.99, March, ISBN 978 1 78335 093 3 As he lay dying Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future. A professional detective on his last…

R ecently, 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 bellwether and newswire for the media industry, but also a stingy…

Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright as Frank and Claire Underwood in House of Cards . Nathaniel E. Bell/Netflix When the second season of House of Cards closed with Frank Underwood double-tapping his ring on the Oval Office desk, viewers scrambled to explain what it meant. It was such a small gesture, and…

Between Iraq and Afghanistan, there are up to 400,000 Americans who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries from battling IED’s and other aspects of American counterinsurgency wars. In addition to the untold human suffering from these traumatic brain injuries, RAND states “Estimates of the total…

I’ve accepted that Bernie Sanders is likely to lose the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. It’s not over yet, but Clinton is certainly well-positioned. However, if there’s one thing the Democratic establishment should not do at this point, it’s tell Bernie Sanders to quit. For one, Sanders…

After the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, young people began disappearing from neighborhoods like Douar Hicher, a poor suburb of Tunis. It is estimated that between six and seven thousand Tunisians have gone to Syria and Iraq to wage jihad. Credit Photograph by Sebastian Liste / NOOR for The New Yorker…

Music Box Films Entertainment / 28 Feb 2014 Uri Avnery 02.28.14 ‘Our Mothers, Our Fathers’: A Review It is the summer of 1941. Five youngsters – three young men and two young women – meet in a bar and spend a happy evening, flirting with each other, getting drunk, dancing forbidden foreign dances.…

Katharina Schuttler as Greta, Volker Bruch as Wilhelm, Miriam Stein as Charlotte, Tom Schilling as Friedhelm, and Ludwig Trepte as Viktor in Phillip Kadelbach’s Generation War . (Music Box Films) Were there any good Germans during WWII? Over the past two decades, the odds have narrowed. “No serious…

Tom Schilling in a miniseries made for German TV about the Second World War. Credit Illustration By Concepción Studios At the beginning of the ambitious German television miniseries “Generation War,” five young friends (three men and two women) dance and drink in a Berlin bar. The time is June,…

Redzējumi 2016. gada 17. martā Izdrukas versija Māris Zanders: 16. marts – interpretācijas mēģinājums 16. marta gājiena kā rituāla noturīgums kļūst saprotams, ja patur prātā, ka vēstures pieminēšanā var slēpties arī protests pret šodienu. Pirms izklāstu savu interpretāciju, jāmin, ka tā neskar vai…

Reviews The Man Who Invented Fiction By William Egginton Bloomsbury My Struggle: Book Five By Karl Ove Knausgaard Archipelago T his past September in Des Moines, President Obama conducted an unusual conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson. The transcript, published in The New York Review…

La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement by Pierre Bourdieu Editions de Minuit, 670 pp, £9.05, August 1979, ISBN 2 7073 0275 9 In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France – in the very chair occupied today by Pierre Bourdieu – Raymond Aron coined the word ‘sociodicy’: an apt term for the…

‘I used to be a professional musician, playing in a string quartet in the 1960s’, says Richard Sennett smiling. ‘And there was this one woman in particular who came to see us perform all six of the Bartok Quartets in Chicago over the course of a single weekend. Playing all six is very hard to do,…

Buy Go-Betweens for Hitler by Karina Urbach Oxford, 389 pp, £20.00, July 2015, ISBN 978 0 19 870366 2 Before the First World War, the European high aristocracy roamed freely across the continent, taking the waters at Baden-Baden, sampling the sea air at Biarritz, shooting partridge and pheasant at…

Buy The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro Bodley Head, 1246 pp, £35.00, July 2015, ISBN 978 1 84792 364 6 Robert Moses was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five…

http://www.thenation.com/article/damage/