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We Americans have always fancied ourselves to be superior to the banana republics and quasi-dictatorships that we often helped create; now, we are offered a chance to prove it.
Back in September, Evan Osnos looked ahead to what Trump's first term would look like: "Aides are organizing what one Republican close to the campaign calls the First Day Project. 'Trump spends several hours signing papers—and erases the Obama Presidency,' he said.
Elena Ferrante’s latest book to be published in English, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, is also about a woman’s disappearance—her own. In it, Ferrante records her 24-year fight against the manipulation of her authorial identity.
Imagine a road trip across the United States with a voracious friend who eats, sleeps, and breathes music, listening to an endless supply of mixtapes and local radio stations devoted to everything from honky-tonk to underground hip hop, from post-punk to electronica, from teen pop to alt-folk. In the middle of the night, driving, say, through the cornfields of Iowa, or over winding mountain passes in the Rockies, after each song, your friend delivers impassioned impromptu mini-essays locating the lyrics and rhythms in the context of the last thirty-five years of American music. This is what
“Memory,” says Plotinus, “is for those who have forgotten.” The gods have no memory because they know no time, have no need to fight against time, have no fragments of what has been lost to recollect, to re-collect. In India, with its vast stretches of time, with its same lives appearing and appearing again, there is no distinction between learning and remembering. You knew it in your past lives, you have always known it, to learn is to re-mind yourself, bring yourself back into the mind of universal knowledge. Says the Jaiminiya Upanishad: “It is the unknown that you should remember.” And
“I am alarmed,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in “Walking,” his 1862 essay, “when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” The point of his saunter had been to “forget all my morning occupations, and my obligations to society.” Alas: “It sometimes happens I cannot easily shake off the village.” His thoughts were elsewhere. With a gentle lashing of self-reproach, he asks: “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
In 2012 North Carolina elected a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature for the first time in more than a century. The Republicans quickly went to work to ensure that they would not soon lose their newly won grip on state power. One way to do so would be to suppress the votes of African-Americans. In North Carolina, as elsewhere, African-Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates. In fact, as an expert testifying for North Carolina conceded in a case challenging the new voting rules the state eventually adopted, “in North Carolina, African-American race is a
Author Derek Palacio describes his relationship to Cuba, his father’s homeland, as one of “abstraction.” Since he’s never visited the island himself, he told the Kenyon Review, “the people, culture and landscape of [my stories] are not Cuban, then, but are the offspring of my Cuban impressions.” The same might be said for the characters of Palacio’s debut novel, The Mortifications. Its protagonist, Ulises Encarnación, his twin sister, Isabel, and their mother, Soledad, flee Cuba in 1980 and return six years later. But while the island is described with vivid sensory detail, the characters’
Bob Dylan, according to Sean Wilentz’s passionate and informative (if at times lurchingly uneven) new book, “has dug inside America as deeply as any artist ever has.” This is well put, for it suggests the way in which Dylan’s songs (there are now more than five hundred of them) seem to unearth a strange, alternate, subterranean America, an antic shadow country of dirt roads and frontier towns, abandoned mines and teeming plantations, a land inhabited by outlaws, vagabonds, crapshooters, confidence men, vigilantes, and religious fanatics, to name only its most conspicuous citizens.
One hundred and fifty years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, the nation’s first black president paid tribute to “a century and a half of freedom—not simply for former slaves, but for all of us.” It sounds innocuous enough till you start listening to the very different kinds of political rhetoric around us.
“My argument is not with his supporters. It’s with him,” Hillary Clinton said last night at the Presidential debate in St. Louis, gesturing toward her opponent, Donald Trump. Clinton had been asked about her comment, at a private fund-raiser last month, that half of Trump’s supporters belonged to a “basket of deplorables,” and that some were “irredeemable”—including racists and white nationalists. (She later retracted the “half,” but stood by the general description.) Trump got a chance to vent a little bit. “She has hate in her heart,” he said. “When she said they’re irredeemable, to me that
In early July, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did something apparently unprecedented for a Supreme Court justice: She trashed a presidential candidate in the midst of an election. If Donald Trump won the presidency, she warned, “everything is up for grabs.” A few days later, she elaborated, “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president. . . . For the court . . . I don’t even want to contemplate that.” If her husband were still alive, he would have viewed a Trump victory as “time for us to move to New Zealand.” And the next week, she doubled down: “He is a faker. . . . He