Thursday , March 28 2024

Tag Archives: Politics and Affairs

Clinton Book Due in June

I voted for Bill Clinton twice and was happy to do so – he did a lot of things right (NAFTA, welfare reform, race relations) and was lucky as well (the economy). As we all know, it is better to be lucky than to be good. But by the time …

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From a Position of Strength

The current struggle in Iraq proves that we can only successfully work from a position of strength. Due to our weak response to terror prior to 9/11, our enemies concluded that we are decadent and weak, care only for our own comfort, and – especially with our behavior in Somalia …

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Lessig and Vaidhyanathan On Copyright and Culture

Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, is getting quite a bit of attention. We discussed it here yesterday, where you can also hear the entire book for free. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo takes a long look …

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Lessig Wants to Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig’s new book is out, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The site for the book describes it thusly: Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus …

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Buruma on Occidentalism: Great Diagnosis, Terrible Remedy

Ian Buruma, who with his writing partner Avishai Margalit, has been advancing a theory of “Occidentalism” as a counterpart to Said’s “Orientalism” since 9/11, restates his theory in The Chronicle of Higher Education in advance of their new book: the kind of violence currently directed at targets associated with the …

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Will Martin’s Dream Ever ComeTrue?

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other great orators and civil rights leader spoke of the desire for true equality. I have been listening to NPR’s Tavis Smiley show the past few days as …

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“The West is in a race for its life”

Another historian comprehends the danger of fanatical Islamoterrorism: Walter Laqueur – a deeply learned polyglot historian, whose expertise ranges from 19th-century Germany to 20th-century Egypt – has for decades stood out as one of the very few sober and intelligent voices in this undistinguished crowd. His latest book, “No End …

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O’Reilly and Franken Come Out Swinging

CSPAN2’s Book TV sees itself as sober nonfiction book talk each weekend from 8am Saturday to 8am Monday – it is rare that participants nearly come to blows. But this little tiff proves the left-right gulf hasn’t closed any since the war ended: Unlike Ernest Hemingway’s encounter with poet Wallace …

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Of Pete Seeger and Jean Bethke Elshtain

Ancient socialist, peacenik, and folk legend Pete Seeger has recorded a new version of his Vietnam War-era protest song, “Bring Them Home” (seems kind of moot about now) with help from Steve Earle, Ani DiFranco, and Billy Bragg. I would expect nothing different from Seeger, who at 84 is as …

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