Articles by Benj DeMott

We asked our writers and readers for their reflections on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. Here are 13 ways of looking at that day. Death from Above By Hans Koning The first truth about 9/11 is its uniqueness. That is to say that in the early morning of September 11, 2001, it would be a … Read more

Retort Afflicted Powers: Capital & Spectacle in a New Age of War. New Edition, 2006. Verso Timothy Clark is indeed one of our most distinguished art historians. He holds the George C. & Helen N. Pardee Chair and is Professor of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. In a press release dated February … Read more

“It’s Too Soon”—that cowardly phrase planted in the public’s mind by the mainstream media—keeps Oliver Stone’s movie World Trade Center from the people who might especially appreciate its value. The phrase seems designed to control popular sentiment while Stone endeavors to particularize and analyze the huge mix of personal and political feelings that have mounted … Read more

Thomas Mann left Germany when Hitler came to power. He spent the Reich’s twelve years in exile, stripped of his citizenship, a proud enemy of the German state. Here’s a question: which was the greater patriot, Mann or Hitler? Hitler, after all, undid Versailles, created a Grossdeutschland, and reduced the heart of Europe to a … Read more

Earlier this month, The New Yorker‘s George Packer talked up a plan to break up Iraq proposed (in a New York Times op-ed) by Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb, who argue the U.S, in collaboration with Iraq’s neighbors, should broker a divorce between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Iraq may be in process of splitting … Read more

Alan Johnson – editor of the online journal, Democratiya, conducted an interview with Kanan Makiya in December of 2005. Following on from two previous postings here at our website (See “What’s Going On” and “Inside the Whale”), this interview amounts to the next chapter in Makiya’s on-the-fly history of the Iraq “project.” As Alan Johnson … Read more

We’re honored to reprint this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) — her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah. Today is expected to be a very big gathering. … Read more