Today, more than seventy-five years after the liberation of the concentration camps and roughly sixty-five years after the closure of the last of the DP camps in Germany, we find ourselves at a juncture in history that one would be tempted to call unprecedented — Americans taking to the streets, chanting...
Liberalism! The great empty hole in many radicals’ understanding of the political spectrum. In many respects, we treat it like a fact of life, like the weather, but also as something ephemeral, something that will just go away as soon as the real shit, the facts, the structural realities, assert...
Who does half-smart like a renegade Trotskyite? From what I can tell of his biography, James Burnham didn’t come to Trotskyism the way you think a political figure born in the first decade of the twentieth century might — after becoming a Communist and growing disgusted by Stalinism. No, he...
In the summer of 1975, doctoral student James A. Sandos happened upon carbon copies of the first two volumes of the three-volume 1919 report, “An Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force” while conducting research at the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. The report was one result of a legislative inquiry...
A well-crafted debut novel that puts us inside the mind of a young single mother. Who happens to have murdered another child when she was eight. Puts the reader in mind of several famous cases, but deftly sidesteps any comparisons to exploitative, lurid, ripped-from-the-headlines pulp.
It’s honestly getting to be like Charlie Brown and the football, me and these right-wing intellectuals. I mean it when I say I expect more from these people. I didn’t expect the world from Hayek. I know how much a “Nobel” in economics is worth. The Road to Serfdom might...
Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for...
Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t quite prove the famous Fredric Jameson quote used as Ministry for the Future’s epigraph incorrect but he does offer a readable speculative future centered around contemporary struggles. I fear the happy ending comes all too easily (it is science fiction) even if one were to calculate...
I read this out of a desire to get a more finely-grained picture of the recession of the Black Freedom Movement in the 1970s, and what came after. The more I think of it, the more I think that this defeat shaped everything that came after, in much the same...
Semiotic Love, published by Austin’s Awst Press, is a collection of flash and micro fiction that ranges over a wide variety of human relationships — specifically, love in its myriad forms. The recurrent theme, at least among the larger pieces, seems to be that of communication within these relationships. The middle...
