Journal Entry #23
NORFOLK, CONN., June 26—We cannot read even our best correspondents and writers anymore should they dare to assume a perspective that deviates even minorly from the orthodoxy. In consequence, one gets into pointless discussions, maybe tipping toward argument, with perfectly…
Journal Entry #22
VAGLIAGLI, NEAR SIENA, June 10—By the grace and generosity of someone very dear, I finish a couple of weeks in Italy today, most of its spent in a stone farmhouse on a vineyard in this little commune between Siena and Florence….
On Writers, the Media, and the Corruptions of Power
Joel Whitney, whose book Finks is about the CIA’s subversion of US culture, talks about the scars left by the Cold War. In Part 1 of my exchange with Joel Whitney, conducted shortly after OR Books published Finks: How the CIA Tricked the…
How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers
Joel Whitney talks about his book Finks, which exposes the agency’s corruption of American culture during the Cold War. “The past is a foreign country,” L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in…
Journal Entry #21
Something for Memorial Day. NEW YORK, 29 MAY—This past week, in anticipation of a couple of weeks’ travel, I finished work on the transcript of an excellent interview I conducted early in the spring. Readers of my column will know…
Journal Entry #20
Tipping Over. NORFOLK, CONN., 17 MAY—To begin, a couple of quotations. No. 1: “We are seeing in the U.S. a developing schizophrenia. There is no other way I can explain the accusations against the acting [sitting] U.S. president that he…
How China Is Building the Post-Western World
Beijing’s Belt and Road project may be the largest single infrastructure program in human history. Not infrequently, I bang on in this space and elsewhere about “parity between West and non-West.” I consider achieving this the single most pressing necessity…
Letters From the May 22/29, 2017, Issue
Schlesinger and Navasky on McCarthyism… Pollitt, Navasky, Grandin, and Lawrence on ‘Russiagate’… By Our Readers, Victor Navasky, Patrick Lawrence, Greg Grandin and Katha Pollitt McCarthyism, Past and Present In Victor Navasky’s piece “McCarthyism & Trump” [April 24/May 1], the author quotes from a New York Post…
The Military Now Runs US Foreign Policy
And as Trump’s recent turnabout shows, the establishment will brook no dissent from the reigning orthodoxy. You would expect, amid all the tiresome comment written and broadcast on Donald Trump’s “first 100 days,” something worth thinking about might have appeared…
Journal Entry #19
NORFOLK, Conn., April 28—The pimping of ordinary human emotions in the name of the tragedies others suffer is often nearly as infradig as the events the pimp attempts to score against. I wish, in the context I’ll now describe, more…
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