Have the majority of Americans reached their tipping point? The trials of so many of Trump’s accomplices have yet to get under way and it will be months before the final report by Robert Mueller and his investigators is published. (Does anyone have any idea how many lawsuits against Trump and his policies are working their way through state and federal courts? The cumulative fees will be staggering by the time the cases are decided.) Patience may be a foundational democratic virtue but what if we’re in the midst of a cold civil war? Maxine Waters seems right on. The time for civility-mongering is past.
Nation
Our Developer President: A Dialogue Between Samuel Stein and Rachel Weber on Real Estate, Cities, and Trumpery
There’s a certain kind of person who sees real estate everywhere they look — someone who walks around a city and thinks not just, “who lives here?” but “who owns this, who’d they buy it from, and where’d they get the money?” Some think this way because they’re in the property racket, or hope one day to be. Others with this mentality are just perpetually pissed off at the ways land and housing have been hyper-commoditized, turning cities into luxury products. We are definitely in the latter camp, and as such have quite a bit to obsess over these days. The following dialogue, between two urban planners and property scholars (one in New York City and one in Chicago), ruminates on the meaning of the Trump presidency and the relationship between property development and governance.
Citizen Russ
In a recent interview, Charles Barkley told about an unusual phone call he received from Bill Russell–a call that persuaded Barkley to stop complaining about how much he paid in taxes…
Stormy’s Tale (Or: Protect Me From What I Want)
Extry! Extry! Read all about it. The president is a spanko.
A Hard Case
Ralph Peters–longtime Fox News commentator–just published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post explaining “Why I left Fox News.”
There Is No Gun
There is no gun in this poem.
The Doomsday Machine
I have been hit like a ton of bricks by Daniel Ellsberg’s new book, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.[1]
Me Two Cents
One evening in the summer of 1960, while waiting on a rocker-sofa on the porch of a friend’s home to give him a ride to a party, his step-father sat down beside me – and grabbed my cock.
Feminist Criticism
Bill Cosby was a shitty comedian. His material on stage was smug, take-my-wifeish, and dated long before reports surfaced of his sexual predation.
Game Theory
Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August, by Oliver Hilmer (Other Press. 2018. Trans. from the German by Jefferson Chase) begins on the first day of that summer’s Olympics and ends on their closing. But the Olympics were a smokescreen, a puppet show, a diversion of less significance than the fireworks which concluded Joseph Goebbels $800,000 last-night party, bloodying the sky red.
Devil’s Due (A Defense Lawyer’s Approach to Lawfare)
Jim Coleman (pictured below) is a longtime law professor at Duke and Co-Director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic.
In my day job, I constantly fight law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges who are indifferent to whether my clients are innocent.
Judges disregard misconduct by cops and prosecutors; indeed, they often protect them from public scrutiny.
Jimmy Stewart Meets H.P. Lovecraft
This Nunes memo set me thinking.
Who’s Afraid of Michael Wolff?: The Uses of “Fire and Fury”
I’m a freak about timing. To me, a story without a peg is like a song without a hook. But it’s taken me quite awhile to find a copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Since I’m less interested in the book than in its reception, I guess it’s okay to file late.
Telltale Signs
I only recently caught up with Ed Schultz’s swerve from “prairie populist” to pro-Kremlin anchor-man. He got his change in the summer of 2016 after he’d lost his gig at MSNBC. Schultz’s plasticity has always been apparent. (I posted on Big Ed’s persona—“250 pounds of ham and main chance”—back in 2010.)
The Fascist International and Its Fellow Travelers
Greil Marcus responds below to queries from Justyne Dillingham who asked Marcus to comment on (1) the motive behind Putin’s interference in the American election and (2) the “line” of certain leftists–writing in “publications like The Nation and The Intercept as well as mainstream outlets like The London Review of Books”—who claim Russia-gate is “a hoax made up by the intelligence agencies and pushed by Democrats to excuse their failure to win last November.”