November 2009
Gentrified Fiction by Elizabeth Gumport
Brooklyn gentrification novelists have always alleged that aesthetics, not class, unite and divide their borough. Not so, Amy Sohn tells us in her new novel Prospect Park West. What matters is money, and in Park Slope white people have it. Sohn's privileged characters do not pretend otherwise, nor do they deny their status as gentrifiers.
Are Comics Like Reading with Training Wheels? by Shawn Huston
About a week before the deadline for this column, I had a particularly eventful and stressful day, one that emotionally crystallized what had been an eventful and stressful month. In the evening, I got a chance to unwind with many of my usual choices—making dinner, watching TV, reading.
How Israel Destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor by Erich Follath & Holger Stark
The mighty Euphrates river is the subject of the prophecies in the Bible's Book of Revelation, where it is written that the river will be the scene of the battle of Armageddon: "The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East."
The United Nations' shameful complicity in this year's corrupt Afghan elections by Christopher Hitchens
If the time ever does come when we look back on our intervention in Afghanistan as a humiliating debacle, this past weekend may well be identified as one of the moments when the calamity became irreversible.
Opium, Rape and the American Way by Chris Hedges
The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women.
Canada Sets Aside Its Boreal Forest as Giant Carbon Vault by Suzanne Goldenberg
By banning logging, mining and oil drilling in an area twice the size of California, Canada is ensuring its boreal forests continue to soak up carbon
In the far north latitudes, buried within a seemingly endless expanse of evergreen forests, the authorities in Canada are building up one of the world's best natural defences against global warming.
If You Thought the Last Bailout of Wall Street Was Disastrous, Here Comes TARP on Steroids by David Sirota
I recall that September day like it was yesterday -- the explosion so stunning, so memorable. It wasn't 9/11/01, it was 9/29/08 -- a moment when a rare blast of populist democracy briefly singed the economic terrorists who hold the Capitol hostage.
Did Punk Rock Tear Down the Wall? by Tim Mohr
On November 9, 1989, the East German underground guitar band Die Anderen—the Others—had a gig on the other side of the Berlin Wall. They were playing the Pike Club, in the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg, home to the legendarily decadent and anarchic scene that inspired David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Nick Cave.
Do We Really Want to Enshrine Insurance Monopoly into Law? by John Nichols
The Affordable Health Care for America Act was approved by the U.S. House Saturday night with overwhelming support from progressive Democrats who serve in the chamber and from a president who was nominated and elected with the enthusiastic support of progressive voters.
But that does not mean that informed and engaged progressives are entirely enthusiastic about the measure.
Why I Voted NO by Dennis Kucinich
We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem.
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