This is a really good essay from Mark Lilla on the evolution of conservative politics in the United States. He explains that the important change has been the rise of redemptive reactionaries: people ‘who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge [...]
As a tie-in to my link to the Lessig video I posted yesterday, here’s Ezra Klien’s review of Lessig’s ‘Republic, Lost’ for the New York Review of Books. Klein isn’t so convinced that money is the root problem with US politics.
I wish I could employ Lawrence Lessig just to make presentations every day.
Since the Democratic Party’s primary process began in 2007, Andrew Sullivan has been arguing that no politician is better at playing the long game than Barack Obama. Here is the argument in distilled form.
Great, short piece on the English accent as it existed in 1776: I’d always assumed that Americans used to have accents similar to today’s British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same. Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents [...]
Feel like the Obama sheen has worn off and you’re looking for a new messiah? Elizabeth Warren may be that special someone.
Just a great piece by Republican outcast David Frum on what’s wrong with the GOP. Terrific and terrifying.
Lemony Snicket went and observed the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City. Scroll down.
Really all you need to know: Five nights a week, Phoenix dresses in a superhero outfit of his own invention and chases car thieves and breaks up bar fights and changes the tires of stranded strangers. I’ve flown to Seattle to join him on patrol. Great writing by Jon Ronson for GQ.
Michael Lewis investigates just how bad local finances are in California (spoiler alert: real bad): To understand the regional economies, [Meredith Whitney] had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local [...]