A Website of the Radical Imagination
Penniless and nearing thirty circa 1990, the one ace up my sleeve was that I “worked with Grossman.” Grossman. The Brandeis English department’s quite literal resident “genius” poet and pedagogue. In August 1989, Allen R. Grossman had in fact received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant. Needless to say, I owned … Read more
What follows below comes from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (PM Press, 2014). First of the Month will reprint pieces from Linebaugh’s collection of essays, which has been called a “Commonist Manifesto,” throughout 2024. The following text is an excerpt from a piece of Linebaugh’s that served as the foreword to … Read more
This essay on Robert Silvers–first posted here in 2017–ends with an invocation of Joan Didion’s essay on the Central Park Five. For that reason and others your editor has lifted it out of the archives to pair with Richard Goldstein’s No-in-Thunder to hagiographic responses to Didion’s passing…
Barack Obama’s A Promised Land tries to do God’s work as per Simone Weil: It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. … Read more
By Stacey Abrams, Michael Brod, Nick Bromell, Robert Chametzky, Kristi Coulter, Leslie Epstein, Bruce Jackson, Bob Levin, C. Liegh McIness, Zuzu Myers, Asha Sanaker, Aram Saroyan, Budd Shenkin, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, Alison Stone, Laurie Stone, Bill Svelmoe, and this walker in the city… New York Minute Click the link to watch Michael Rapaport (it … Read more
Cultural Studies 1983 (2016) Stuart Hall; Duke University Press Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (2017), Stuart Hall, (Editor, Bill Schwarz); Duke University Press Resistance Through Rituals (1976) S. Hall and T. Jefferson; Hutchinson & Co. “Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community” Phil Cohen in Culture, Media, Language (1981) edt. by S. Hall, D. … Read more
By Michael Brod, Robert Chametzky, Benj DeMott, Joel DeMott, Ty Geltmaker, Eugene Goodheart, Casey Hayden, George Held, Adam Hochschild, Wesley Hogan, Ben Kessler, Brian Kinstler, Bob Levin, Greil Marcus, Scott McLemee, Dennis Myers (x2), Yasmin Nair, Nathan Osborne, George Scialabba, Budd Shenkin, Fredric Smoler & Alison Stone
Eugene Goodheart has invited responses to his new First piece (posted below) which takes in student protests against microaggressions and the more macro analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.[1] I’m skeptical of Goodheart’s attempt to hook-up the world-view of those students with Coates’s World. (More on that anon.) But his critique of the … Read more
Eugene Goodheart offered two angles on the war in Gaza just before the cease-fire, speaking truth to powers that be on both sides of the conflict.
PRAISE FOR FIRST OF THE MONTH/YEAR “The only leftist publication I could imagine being read at both Columbia University and Rikers.” TIME OUT “Arresting, fractious…At once contrarian, ambitiously inclusive and wide-ranging… [First] has attracted an extended crew of intelligent, passionate, polemical writers.” AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW “A cultural and intellectual publication that is singularly lively, and … Read more
The government shutdown and debt ceiling mess deflected attention from the Syria crisis. But Eugene Goodheart’s careful analysis of that situation is still on time. We begin his latest dispatch on Obama’s “trimming” with a forward-looking “postscript” the author added to his original piece. As for Obama’s ambivalence about going to war and his openness … Read more
Eugene Goodheart’s analysis of the Syrian quandary doesn’t take in the story’s latest twists, but it comprehends the president’s humane, cautious approach to the issue. Goodheart’s piece amounts to an addendum to the case he makes in his new book, Holding the Center: In Defense of Political Trimming, which places Obama’s default stance within a … Read more
Comments on the debates and/or the election by Bernard Avishai, Robert Chametzky, Benj DeMott, Carmelita Estrellita, Ty Geltmaker, Eugene Goodheart, Allison Hantschel, Casey Hayden, Christopher Hayes, Bob Levin, Barack Obama, Jedediah Purdy, Theodore Putala, James Rosen, Nick Salvatore, Aram Saroyan, Frederick Smoler, Scott Spencer & Patricia Williams.
Introduction The most famous line of the most famous book of one of the great American public intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth-century defines “the problem” of the coming century as “the problem of the color-line.”
I went to Cairo a couple of years ago to attend a conference on international health. It was held at a hotel down the hill from the pyramids at Giza and on a free day I did my touristy duty. The pharoahs’ tombs didn’t get me too high. Maybe because I kept my head down … Read more