Last year, when the Washington Post’s Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq, an anonymous contributor to the leftist web network Indymedia announced the sad news with the tasteless headline “WP Nazi columnist bites the Iraqi dust.” Word spread quickly, especially after Glenn Reynolds, the hawkish proprietor of the widely read InstaPundit.com, declared that “the Indymedia...
The left-wing press is in an awful state. Take the Nation (please): there’s little reason even to flip through it anymore. Oh, Alexander Cockburn is always a pleasure, and Stuart Klawans is a fine movie critic, and Christopher Hitchens is worth reading when he isn’t issuing pretentious dispatches from Europe. But good feature stories are...
We are, they say, entering an age of New Media, of talk radio, desktop publishing, and the World Wide Web. Not everyone in the old media is pleased. “The new media cater to and are built up by people who used to sit on bar stools and complain to each other,” declared NBC correspondent Gwen...
The great political project of our time is the rebellion against giantism: against the state, corporate, and professional leviathans that strangle individuals and communities. Of all the ways to injure those monsters, the single least effective one may be to write a book about it. Or, at least, to write the book that Thomas Naylor...
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
“There was a time when it was hip to write about Route 66; I was writing about a suburban street in London. I didn’t envisage my music ever being heard anywhere else.” —Ray Davies It begins, as most rock songs do, with a riff. There is an organ in the background, and a rapidly strumming...
There has never been an election conducted above the local level in which one single ballot determined the outcome. And even if there were, I doubt it would matter. Suppose you could cast the deciding vote in a contest between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Can you honestly say that you would bother? Visiting the...
It is June 1994, and Anthony Hilder is attending a Southern California gathering called “The New World Order.” Two overhead projectors beam book-covers alleging Masonic conspiracies onto the walls. Hilder, white and middle-aged, is the host of two syndicated talk-radio shows, Radio Free America and Radio Free World. He has brought tapes to sell to...