Articles by Benj DeMott

After eight years of life under a president whose power was exercised partly through the denuding and crippling of language, to the point where once familiar words lost their meaning (Clear Skies meant more pollution, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques meant throwing the Geneva Conventions out the window, etc.), the excitement is still high over having a … Read more

Jan Frel – an editor at AlterNet – interviewed historian Lawrence Goodwyn right before the midtern elections. First is honored to reprint their discussion of “Obama, the larger currents in our political life, and the possibility of a rebirth in our democratic culture.” Jan Frel: It seems there’s quite a bit of disagreement about what … Read more

Two well-known American historians – Sean Wilentz and Lawrence Goodwyn – offered profoundly different commentaries on the Age of Obama around the time of the midterm elections. You can read Wilentz here and “First” has just reprinted Goodwyn’s q & a with an AlterNet editor above. Goodwyn aims to lift up America’s natural-born egalitarians – those … Read more

The Sisyphus Syndrome is the name of a jazz opera I wrote with music by David Murray that we performed in Paris and Milano last February. The title is my appropriation of W.E.B. Dubois’ comment likening the Afro American struggle to the Greek myth of Sisyphus who, because he refused to die when ordered, was … Read more

Prologue: New York Story I went in for the matzo ball soup and ended up married to a Muslim. I met my wife-to-be while she was working as a hostess at Carnegie Deli. Her New York immigrant story has been in my head as I’ve read political narratives about the “Ground Zero” mosque. I might … Read more

In 1963, before my senior year at Brandeis, I worked as a summer substitute mailman out of a station near 52nd & Market, ten blocks from my West Philadelphia home. I was consumed that summer by the desire to find my way toward a meaningful life. I had a girl in Boston who was the … Read more

When Sharpe James pulled out of Newark’s Mayoral race, a lacerated Amiri Baraka offered up a rhymed response to the news. WHAT ABOUT THIS, PILGRIMS? Say, for instance, somebody heard, and the Star Ledger half dropped the infamous “word” that Sharpe James had been meeting w/ the Bugger all along? (Somebody tell us that’s Wrong!) … Read more