Bouncing off an earlier thread, I realized that two superlative books written the past few years on the financial history of our current crisis are available as free pdf’s.
Just throwing mud on the wall here, but combining these two for a study-discussion might be interesting as a kind of long-term discussion. If I’d seen […]

I like cultural crit. Think it should be encouraged.
Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and […]

The press likes short wars. Its audience is never so eager for news as during an armed conflict. The first newspapers date from the wars of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Television likes the melodrama of exploding shells and blazing tanks. And it is this very eagerness to report the fighting that makes […]

Despite selling out every night it screens at the cinema on Courtney Place and becoming the highest grossing film of all time, few have picked up on Avatar’s blatant allusions to the historical drama of Bougainville that happened on New Zealand’s doorstep thirteen years ago. The films names, plot and characters are almost direct references […]

Correlations between anniversaries and historical conjunctures are likely to be ironic. When nlr was launched in London fifty years ago, in January 1960, it was one of myriad small harbingers of left renewal. Anti-colonial forces were registering victories in Africa, Asia and the Arab world; the Communist movement was emerging from the stranglehold of Stalinist […]

The Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, pronounced jay-sock by members of the US armed forces, carries with it a mystique. The press, JSOC’s promoters and its critics, as well as the entertainment media, have all contributed to its mystique; and that mystique is promoted my the military because it functions […]

DISTRIBUTE WIDELY… please
I don’t generally engage in reaction-blogging, but I just now finished watching a live town-hall meeting in Florida with the prez, wherein the last person called upon asked Obama why he hadn’t fulfilled his campaign promise to abolish the military’s homophobic policy of don’t-ask-don’t-tell.
Obama meandered on for a few moments about domestic partner […]

Well, we need to have the discussion. There’s a lot to unpack on this grotesque Supreme Court decision; and a lot of people are going to be talking about it for quite a long while. When something is being chattered about like this is, and will be, then some of the most powerfully […]

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.” […]

I’ll be lazy and just grab three feature articles from a mainstream “left” site for now. I figure most readers know the outline of the story, but wanted to acknowledge it publicly anyway. The consensus is true enough: the death toll in Haiti’s recent severe earthquake was far higher than it would […]