How the Midwest Was Lost

The concept that each American state is its own “laboratory of Democracy”—a term coined in 1932 by Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis—comes from the Progressive Era. But in recent years, many of these proverbial laboratories, even traditionally liberal ones, have been more like Frankenstein’s basements of conservative experimentation. As a native of Wisconsin, journalist Dan Kaufman is deeply troubled by the stunning rightward shift in the Badger State during the governorship of plasticine Koch Brothers automaton Scott Walker, elected in 2010. This was a transformative moment for a state

culture June 13, 2011

Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis is credited with two firsts. She was the first great female rock critic and the first pop critic for the New Yorker (from 1968 to 1975), breaking the gender ceiling in a male-dominated field and the class ceiling by writing about low-culture in a high-middlebrow context. Willis's music writing is compiled for the first time in Out of the Vinyl Deeps (edited by her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, with a foreword from current New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones). It's guaranteed to stay at the top of the rock-critic canon. Writing in the late '60s and early '70s, Willis was expanding