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…
“This will stop only when the American people get fed up”: American exceptionalism, the New York Times, and our foreign policy after Barack Obama
Our smartest modern military historian explains to Salon what’s wrong about our adventures in the Middle East Part one of my interview with Andrew Bacevich, the soldier-turned-scholar who has just published “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military…
“The scope of our failure”: The real story of our decades-long foreign policy disaster that set the Middle East on fire
The brilliant Andrew Bacevich tells Salon why our massive march to folly in Middle East has to be seen as one war I first interviewed Andrew Bacevich, the soldier turned scholar, after he spoke at the Hope Club, an old-line…
America’s immoral exceptionalism: The lie we keep telling ourselves about foreign policy and democracy
Americans are disgusted with all of these wars, but feel powerless to do anything about it The task of historians in our time is to unbury the buried. For journalists, it is to see that the truth of events is…
23 Surprising Insights about Free-Market Capitalism
One of the noted features of economics for the past century or so is its ever-fainter relationship with history. Statistics, method, data-collection, econometrics, modeling, empirical observation – these are the tools and preoccupations of what is to some a grim…
A Near Perfect Spy Novelist
ABSOLUTE FRIENDS. By John le Carré. Little, Brown. 455 pp. $26.95. A year ago now, when the Bush Administration was preparing the world for an American invasion of Iraq, John le Carré wrote a column of scathing, sharp-toothed commentary for…
A Kiss in Java
INDONESIAN DESTINIES. By Theodore Friend. Belknap/Harvard. 628 pp. $35. INDONESIA: Peoples and Histories. By Jean Gelman Taylor. Yale. 420 pp. $39.50. In a broad square not far from the center of Jakarta, a large obelisk of concrete soars into the sky….
A Stone Unturned
Someone once described Graham Greene as the novelist of decolonizing Britain. England during and after the war and the imperial fall was his true subject, the uncut stone from which he chiseled his themes. Think of knob-kneed, lonely-hearted Wilson, the…
Excursions in the Real World
THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT. By William Trevor. Viking. 227 pp. $24.95. Why is so much fiction written in our language and why is so much of what is written of so little consequence? The novels come and go as…
‘Our’ Gide?
This article focuses on the books “Gore Vidal: A Biography,” by Fred Kaplan and “Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking. Collected Sex Writings,” edited by Donald Weise. These books are biographies of Gore Vidal. Vidal’s life was that fought between the public…
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