About Benj Demott

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first take on Obama’s impromptu speech after the Trayvon Martin verdict still seems on point: “No president has ever done this before. It does not matter that the competition is limited. The impact of the highest official in the country directly feeling your pain, because it is his pain, is real. And it … Read more

Skittles, iced tea, hoodie. Seventeen years old. It’s raining and he’s just walking around. Very suspicious. Though cops tell Zimmerman to stay in his truck, he needs to find a street sign. One vers- ion claims self-defense. Fox News anchors rave about gold teeth, suspension, drugs. Show Trayv- on pose tough, blow smoke. Never vary … Read more

It seems I’ve been drafted to give the last word on a whole generation, a whole epoch of human life, struggle and whatever realization. The real boundaries of our lives are material as well as in our heads. The question is how do we use one dimension against the other. How do we fly when … Read more

First thanks Edwin Frank for enabling us to reprint Greil Marcus’s introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Gilbert Seldes’ The Stammering Century. “I came gradually to want to prove nothing,” Gilbert Seldes writes in his introduction to The Stammering Century. This simple sentence is a key to this galvanic, awestruck chronicle of the revivals, … Read more

It is customary to view principle and compromise as antagonists and sometimes they are. But there is also the principle of compromise essential to the democratic process. Ideally, it is a bringing together of opposing sides in a peaceful and rational manner. It assumes the legitimacy of opposition within reasonable constraints. Democracy “suffers” from conflicts … Read more

On Inauguration Day and on the day before the State of the Union address, I went to Serious Times dialogues – academic seminars (at New York’s School of Visual Arts) where American radicals ponder “Why doesn’t the United States make social progress?” What follows here takes in the distance between discourse there and spectacles of…social … Read more

A. I am standing outside the rest room near the children’s section on the ground floor of the main Brooklyn Public Library, a sumptuously renovated palace of soaring ceilings and gold inlays. Sumptuously renovated, that is, in every respect but one: the restroom is tiny, jammed, totally unequipped to accommodate the constant flow of visitors. … Read more