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I have no idea how many readers wrote to tell them. But I know of at least one. This was my email message to The New York Times Book Review: (“Chelsea Mornings,” Oct. 28) Mr. Burroughs wrote the manuscript at the Villa Muniria in Tangier (at 1 Calle Magallanes, where Jack Kerouac typed up an […]

It is a delicious irony of life in New York to ride the subway during the morning rush hour with Dave Frishberg’s “Quality Time” playing on your iPod Among other things, they offer an eyeful on the not small matter of prevarication, which some would submit is the issue of our time. Have a look […]

The Cost of the War in Iraq (JavaScript Error)

“Nelson Algren’s Last Night!” Made by Warren Leming and Carmine Cervi, it’s a Chicago: City on the Make(from the introduction to the 1961 edition dedicated to Joan Baez) Meanwhile, per World Can’t Wait: Today a belligerent President Bush comes to the United Nations to impress upon the world that the U.S. is in the Middle […]

Laugh track included: Via

Paul Krugman’s The Sunni Genocide, December 8, 2005. Lede: Now that Harold Pinter has given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he has also provided us with cover to post what may be the most incredible item — truly the hardest to believe — we’ve ever put up. It’s not only about genocide, which we’ve written […]

Jay Rosen lays it out.

The jingoism implicit in daily life taints everything we say, let alone what we do. To use my friend Bill Osborne’s term, we are all “Orwellian zombies.” This includes even the most sincere opponents of the BnnRpbiChris Hedges, a former war correspondent. His loathing of war in general and the Iraq war in particular expressed […]

Poetry as Insurgent Art: I am signaling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door… What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? … The master class […]

ventriloquist dummy took a powder, Stephen Lee Myers

White House resignation: — Leon Freilich Postscript: Now

The aaaeulc has gained a craven combination of mindless BananaRepublicans and feckless BananaDemocrats. The dog days of summer are upon us, too. See ya later. Aug. 10: Oh, and before I go … here’s a postscript: mi amigo with reference to the “brown-skinned shadows” in Iraq, “whose violent demise need not touch the American realm.” […]

U.S. military can’t find 190,000 weapons given willy-nilly to Iraqi forces when security training was run by Gen. David Petraeus. Which raises fears, as The Washington Post delicately puts it, that the military genius who is now the top U.S. commander in Iraq has armed the insurgents fighting U.S. troops. Makes you wonder what else […]

WSJ editorial assures us, “No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin.” Well, nobody has said he intends to ruin it. To use a favorite word of the WSJ editorial board, that’s a canard. Rupe simply intends to run the Journal the way he […]

When you’re a mathematician who analyses weapons systems as an independent consultant to the U.S. government, you pay attention to military appropriations (not least because you like to get paid). So it was eyebrow-raising to receive a message from just such a weapons analyst telling me how much he’d learned from Adam Cohen’s recent editorial, […]