Harold Norse, RIP
I’ve just heard the sad (but not unexpected news) that the beat poet Harold Norse has died aged 92. I spent the Summer of 1999 living in an apartment on Albion St in San Francisco’s Mission District,...
View ArticleRory Stewart on Dealing with the Obama Administration
I missed this one earlier in the Summer (I was on holiday). From the FT: Since arriving at Harvard in June last year, he has been consultant to several members of Barack Obama’s administration,...
View ArticleVigilante Man
Happy birthday, Woody Guthrie, 100 years old today. Since private security men are back in the news–as well as economic Depression–I thought we might have “Vigilante Man” to mark the occasion. The...
View ArticleFrom the Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
You promise, in your letter of Octob 23. 1787. to give me in your next, at large, the conjectures of your Philosopher on the descent of the Creek Indians from the Carthaginians, supposed to have been...
View ArticleLeslie Stephen on The Times on the American Civil War
I HAVE, I hope, raised a prima facie presumption that the Times was labouring under some delusion. It had omitted some element from its calculations, sufficient to distort the whole history of the...
View ArticleOne Hundred Things Norman Geras and I Corresponded About Over the Last Decade
Country music (including but not limited to Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss, and its relationship to suicide) — Marxism — The war in Iraq — The case the British government made for the war...
View ArticleHarriet Martineau explains why socialism will come to America before it comes...
From Society in America (1837), vol. 2, pp. 127-8: In England, the prevalent dissatisfaction must subsist a long time before anything effectual can be done to relieve it. The English are hampered with...
View ArticleBonnie Honig writes to the Chancellor of the University of Illinois at...
[Letter by Bonnie Honig, hyperlinks added by CB] Dear Chancellor Wise, (and Members of the Board of Trustees, and the UIUC community of faculty, staff, and students), I wrote to you when I heard about...
View ArticleQueuing
Why do Americans have to queue for so long to cast their votes? Is it just another aspect of the general American concern to make it tricky to cast a vote that’s been kicking around for quite a while...
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