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On the Egypt revolution and America’s War of 1812
This has been a tough week for anyone who cares about the Egyptian revolution or the future of the country. As Egyptian headed into the final round of voting for a new president — which appears to...
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Fast and Furious ‘scandal’ is a GOP hatchet job
Later this week, the Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder is likely to be held in contempt of Congress — the first time in history that this has happened — in a scandal known as Fast and...
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Marilyn Monroe fifty years on
Today, 5 August, is the fiftieth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death and to mark the occasion almost every photographer who has anything that might be claimed as an ‘unseen’ photograph of her has...
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How the US is playing into the hands of the Salafiyeen
Though the protests at the US embassy in Cairo have begun to die down, the debate rages on. I was in Cairo when these protests started — I wrote here why they should be ignored, arguing they are as a...
View ArticleWhat an Omar Suleiman girl group would sound like
There is a lot to love about this 1963 song “Egyptian Shumba” by The Tammys, a one-hit (or, more accurately, no-hits) wonder from the US. It begins innocuously enough, sounding like any other...
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What Obama lost in this campaign
The election is tomorrow (6 Nov) and it seems likely that Obama will win, though it will be close. The polling guru Nate Silver at the New York Times blog 538 puts Obama’s odds of winning at 86% and...
View ArticleA stars-aligning moment to pass immigration reform
The Republicans are still sorting out why they lost the election so decisively — was Mitt Romney too moderate, was the party too extremist? — but every Republican strategist recognizes that they...
View ArticleWhat is racist about Romney’s 47 percent claim?
On the New York Times opinion page, editor Andrew Rosenthal points to a 1981 interview with the late Republican political strategist Lee Atwater about the party’s famous ‘Southern strategy’ of...
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Sanity on immigration policy, near at last
Two good things came out of the 2012 election cycle: we don’t have Mitt Romney as president and the Republicans figured out that they could not survive as the last redoubt of white rule in American...
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Where the non-Christian Americans are
Republicans like to put about the notion that the US is ‘really’ a Christian country, a semi-official status in complete defiance of the founding principles of the country that is somehow supposed to...
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Tracking the incompetent Trump cabinet
The first 20 days of the Trump presidency show it is worse than we thought in almost every conceivable way. Nearly lost amid the barrage of tweets and soul-destroying executive orders is the...
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Police shootings database
One of the astounding things about being American is how often the police kill our citizens. Like everything else, responses to this are sharply polarized: people on the right generally regard the...
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is wrong about Trump voters
Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excerpt in the Atlantic from his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, that ran under the title “The First White President.” It is characteristically forceful and...
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The fall of men at the NYRB
Well, that didn’t last long. Not even a month ago I was celebrating my unexpected pleasure, as a loyal reader of the New York Review of Books, in seeing that a long great publication had gotten even...
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