On this day, the fortieth anniversary of his untimely death, I come to praise Philip K. Dick, not to bury him.
I was seduced by the tautness of his language and the grandiosity of his worldview.
At the times we most need to communicate calmly and comprehensively, we blur and obfuscate, posture and lie, or package the news in clichés. That is a telltale sign that the speech serves a private agenda, not the common and urgent need for clarity.
An eyewitness account of the end of the engrossing first act of the Standing Rock movement.
James Traub’s short biography of Judah Benjamin is a fine, highly accessible introduction not only to Benjamin but to the subject of southern Jews, their relationship to the Confederacy, and their experience as slaveholders.
So many people got involved, for so many different reasons, that protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline was (nearly) a blank template. This gave many opportunities for conflict and few firm measures of success, except oil never flowing in the pipeline.
One of the few points of agreement left to us is that our whole culture is “oversensitive” now—that favorite castigation—though in different directions, canceling and banning and vilifying. We are miserable about it, here in this land that lauds bold and fearless action.
The American-Mexican novelist and author of Prayers for the Stolen, adapted for Netflix, reflects on women’s rights, the beauty and danger of life in Mexico, and being “the granddaughter of surrealism.”
John F. Kennedy was a twentieth-century man and a twentieth-century politician but he seemed like fresh air and change because of his youth and verve. Logevall’s biography adds to the literature that students and history buffs can use to judge for themselves.
In Savage Messiah, Laura Grace Ford stands in the best of the “psychogeographer” lineage, at turns practical and imaginative, concrete and incendiary.