I was hardly the only Black Bloc veteran who took part in planning the initial strategy for Occupy Wall Street. In fact, anarchists like myself were the real core of the group that came up with the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park, the “99%” slogan, the General Assembly process, and, in fact, who collectively decided that we would adopt a strategy of Gandhian non-violence and eschew acts of property damage. More…
A letter from Alexander Cockburn and reply by Wes Enzinna. “We have here the utterly conventional reduction of a left-wing writer.” “Would that it weren’t the case, but John was as marginal as they come.” More…
Jason Farago must be the only person left on the planet who will miss Gordon Brown. I’m including even diehard Labour voters here, who must have secretly hoped for or expected yesterday’s resignation announcement. For the periods on the either side of the height of the financial crisis, Brown was spectacularly unpopular. More…
It was with some surprise that I learned of Emily Gould’s ad hominem attack on me at nplusonemag.com. Her vitriol against my new book, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the 21st Century, seems based on her reading of its Acknowledgments section. Gould is the person, after all, who “created a small-scale publishing industry out of mutual abuse.” More…
Dear Mark, When you and I read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or this spring, in a group that met every morning for a week in the second-floor cafeteria of the Houston Street Whole Foods, we had many arguments about the nature of marriage. Now I seem to be joining you in another, though our private conversation has become, in something like the ambiguous transformation wrought by marriage itself, public. More…
Fairey no doubt learned that it’s a good idea to reveal some of your sources of appropriation or inspiration or whatever fair use dictates we call it. He probably also learned that it’s not a good idea to reveal them all. His borrowings from They Live are obvious and not uncommented on, but no serious critic of his has bothered to watch the Carpenter film. More…
To the Editors: In “Reality Publishing,” [N1BR, January 13, 2009], an article recently posted on the online version of n+1, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington suggests that there is a partnership between the National Book Critics Circle and the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. No such partnership exists. More…
Dear Senator Clinton, I know that it is still weeks before your confirmation hearings, but I write you in the hope that you might redress a grievance that I have with Condoleezza Rice. I realized that sometime between 1998 and 2008 the State Department had redesigned the familiar U.S. passport. It is my hope that your department can swiftly revert to the old, Madeleine Albright-era design. More…
Robbins apparently believes that we only do things in the service of our own interests and therefore, if we’re to act on behalf of other people, we have to rig up some mechanism (call it culture, call it heritage) to convince ourselves that at least some of the others really are us and so their interests really are ours. And I’m the individualist! More…
Liu begins his article by self-identifying as a fan of the NBA. One wonders: is it necessary that such self-identification should lead to a thinly veiled pro-corporate political position? Perhaps. After all, sports fans want their “home” team to win a championship. This calls for the best young players, which calls for money, which calls for public funding for arenas. More…
We are, indeed, sophisticates. And we are certainly seductive. I have used my charms to lure several CEOs to marry me, and scores of pool-boys and paparazzi to bed me. In fact, I am somewhat confused by your use of the word “spinsterism“—as Jane Austen reminds us, chronicling the activities of our ancestors, it’s rather difficult to keep wealth unattached. More…
