Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity. The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker Read more
While I’m very much interested in Shakespeare’s life, I’m more interested in my own. What I extrapolate from The Winter’s Tale is that if Leontes deserves a break, so do I. There came a time in my life when I needed to be forgiven. I wasn’t. If I must take my consolation from a play rather than from any flesh and blood Hermione, that’s not quite so bleak as it sounds. Yes, I would have preferred real forgiveness to the... Read more
Connor Friedersdorf on how we should have listened to George McGovern, now nearing death: Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who’d be alive today if the country had listened to McGovern rather than his opponents about the Vietnam War. Think of all the veterans who’d have been better off. Think of... Read more
This horror scenario of an Electoral College tie is completely plausible. I have an unprovable hunch that this scenario is far more likely than almost anyone is thinking. Read more
… should Obama fail, the people who will suffer under a triumphant Republican administration will not be abstract to him; they will be down the street. The poor black women who will doubtlessly find their access to contraception troubled will be degrees closer to Obama than to any other presidential aspirant. That 47 percent whom Mitt Romney will surely treat as the loafers he considers them to be will not be a subject of academic study, they will be his... Read more
Maybe a couple of magazines will survive in print as status symbols at the high end, or as supermarket check-out tabloids at the lower stratosphere. But I doubt even that. Tablet subscriptions seem to me the only viable way forward. The good news is that the savings from this can be plowed back into journalism if revenues from subs and ads revive. In the end, the individual who will decide if magazines survive at all, even on tablets, will be... Read more
But not even I expected Romney to let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly as proudly as he did on Tuesday night. He got in the president’s face. He got in Crowley’s face. That moment when he was hectoring the president about the president’s pension made him look like someone to whom the valet has brought the wrong Mercedes. “You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.” Wow. To me, this was a revelatory, epochal moment. It was... Read more
… many a BlackBerry owner will not mince words about how they feel about their phone. “I want to take a bat to it,” Ms. Crosby said, after waiting for her phone’s browser to load for the third minute, only to watch the battery die. “You can’t do anything with it. You’re supposed to, but it’s all a big lie.” … “BlackBerry users are like Myspace users,” sneers Craig Robert Smith, a Los Angeles musician. “They probably still chat on... Read more
That’s the trouble when you run against a shape-shifter. He has no shame in jettisoning every position he took in the primaries. That was a different market to sell to. Now he has a new market, so he has new policies and a new persona. In office, he will find a new market to sell to day to day. And the GOP base so wants Obama out of there, and out of history, they don’t care that Romney is a... Read more
THE ROMANTIC PORTRAIT of the blasphemer that I have just painted does not apply to us, not least owing to the success of blasphemy in the West, where it was also called Enlightenment. Diderot needed courage; Monty Python did not. We are beyond shock. The giving and taking of offense is the very structure of our political system, even if we abuse Madison’s privilege. Censors and inquisitors have been replaced by watchdog groups, whose day job is umbrage. We live... Read more
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