A Website of the Radical Imagination
A few months before her death, Ellen Willis emailed to say pieces by Charles O’Brien andFredric Smoler on the Danish Cartoon Controversy posted on this site were “good.” (That was high praise from Ellen whose mode of approbation was the opposite of American idolaters.) Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d … Read more
The following piece appeared here first after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. We’re re-posting it since the author’s thoughts on satire and terror are on point now. The Four Lions is a 2010 film comedy about a matey bunch of Islamist suicide bombers, all but one first or second generation South Asians from some place … Read more
It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside … Read more
When last we spoke… One squireen was eulogizing yet another one [[http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2014/06/lineages_of_the.html]. The still living one, Perry Anderson, found hope in the existence of a newish magazine, Jacobin. It’s been said before: hope that is seen is not hope. So: to the moment. Jacobin wasted no time posting a comment on this week’s killings in … Read more
I’m going to begin with an olive branch: not all of Sunday’s “Unity March” in Paris was a proto-fascist omen (Marine Le Pen and her National Front goons were, after all, cheerleading and hurling scatological slogans from the sidelines, which is a lot like when coaches of certain national soccer teams keep their divas or … Read more
I “Scripture tells us we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger. We were strangers once, too.” That line from Barack Obama’s speech on his executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation took on a different resonance in the wake of Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson and … Read more