Posts in Essays and Reviews
Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

Read More
Millennialism or Extinctionism?

The Libertarian presidential and vice presidential nominees, Gary Johnson and William Weld, are drawing votes from the Democratic nominee for president. This is because members of the Millennial generation, voters under 30, who believe that the Democratic nominee and the Republican nominee are equally evil, are casting a protest vote for the Libertarians.

Read More
Masterful Mimicry Exposes a Painful Pipeline: Review Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes From the Field

In 1992, after the first read through of Anna Deavere Smith’s play Fires in the Mirror, a one-woman show examining the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Smith received an apathetic response. Everybody in the audience, made up largely of theater professionals, she recalls, “said that no one will care about this play.” 

Read More