A Website of the Radical Imagination
What follows is a small classic of reportage on the struggle against oil and gas companies who are trashing Louisiana’s wetlands and spawning toxic sinkholes in places like Bayou Corne. Journalist Lou Dubose doesn’t rely on rhetoric; he’s a reporter. Hip to self-delusive pieties, he lives to expose deviousness of faux-boyish pols like Governor Bobby … Read more
Bill McKibben’s Oil and Honey is a Jeremiad about Global Warming that’s also a charm offensive. The author’s faith in the appeal of his teacherly Yankee persona seems almost as strong as his certitude rising levels of atmospheric carbon will have a devastating impact on the climate. The book jumps between McKibben’s life on the … Read more
Mirror I am white, I can feed silence. My children can breathe, though the air’s fetid with fear extinguished Black men shared. Who will keen for them? Outrage must be boots on blood-stained streets. Can you hear each victim’s last words echo? Each victim’s last words echo. Boots on blood-stained streets – can you hear … Read more
David Brooks agrees with the substance of Obama’s executive action on immigration, but believes that he has transgressed the Constitution in the process. The president has usurped the role of the legislature. For Brooks, process transcends substance, so apart from expressing sympathy for the substance of Obama’s action he has little to say about what … Read more
A few months before her death, Ellen Willis emailed to say pieces by Charles O’Brien andFredric Smoler on the Danish Cartoon Controversy posted on this site were “good.” (That was high praise from Ellen whose mode of approbation was the opposite of American idolaters.) Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d … Read more
It’s Christmas Eve and it has been raining all day in a kind of incessant Blade Runner post-apocalyptic way: a muddy Christmas! Gasoline is suddenly well under three bucks a gallon so it’s hello greenhouse and goodbye ozone. Hunting season upstate and my dog has found a bag of guts a neighbor has left outside … Read more
When last we spoke… One squireen was eulogizing yet another one [[http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2014/06/lineages_of_the.html]. The still living one, Perry Anderson, found hope in the existence of a newish magazine, Jacobin. It’s been said before: hope that is seen is not hope. So: to the moment. Jacobin wasted no time posting a comment on this week’s killings in … Read more