Archive: 2008

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From the Center for Public Integrity: Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson upped his ante in former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s unregulated issues-advocacy group in August, with a $750,000 donation…

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Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz has published a column discussing attempts by blogger Andrew Sullivan (disclosure: a good friend) to get to the bottom of the (admittedly bizarre) “Trig…

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“I’ve spent the last few weeks talking to [Wall Street traders], and they want this money so badly—it’s an obsession,” Adam Davidson said last night during an NPR report. “Obviously…

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Some people are fussy about their books, insisting that the margins within remain pristine, treating each volume as a sacred object. Although I have a fair number of first editions,…

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From the Sunlight Foundation: If you haven’t been under a rock lately, you know that the Bush Administration is proposing a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street. What you might…

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James K. Galbraith teaches economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an…

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George Michelsen Foy’s article “Bollywood Shuffle” appears in the October Harper’s Magazine. Associate Editor Benjamin Austen catches up with Foy now that the issue is on newsstands. 1. “Bollywood Shuffle”…

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Nate Silver is the founder of the popular website FiveThirtyEight.com and a writer, analyst, and partner at a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. He developed a system called PECOTA,…

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Caught in the Web, 1860. After many years of increasing borrowing and at least thirteen months of evidence of an impending catastrophe, American financial institutions faced the worst credit crisis…

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The current uproar about John McCain’s remarks on health care is as dumb as the earlier uproar over Barack Obama and the “bittergate” scandal. McCain’s views on deregulation are important,…

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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, quoting your humble glossator, orders the Bush Administration to release photographs of detainees that it has withheld on the improbable argument that the Geneva…

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Here’s a clause that put me on orange alert last week: “but in the end this little novel possesses neither the ambition nor the scope of the author’s big postwar…

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This morning, the Associated Press is reporting what is now an almost regular occurrence: Pakistani troops and tribesmen opened fire on two U.S. helicopters that crossed into the country from…

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The Bush Justice Department continuously tells us it is beleaguered, under-resourced, and having a hard time battling crime. But sometimes its enthusiasm for a prosecution is just effervescent. The latest…

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Gabriel Nathan Schwartz rocketed to national prominence when he was drugged by a hooker and robbed of $50,000 while serving as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. But Schwartz…

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Last week the public learned through an inspector general’s report about the antics of a group of Bush political appointees in senior positions at the Department of the Interior. One…

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“The future is certain. Only the past is difficult to predict.” So went one of the Soviet era’s most revealing jokes, one of which the Stanford historian and poet Robert…

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From my new piece in the October issue of Wallpaper*, on a recent trip to Ashgabat, the political and cultural hub (as it were) of Turkmenistan. The article is not…

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In the week since his death, the web has been full of remembrances of David Foster Wallace, tributes both to the person and to his work. Among the most substantive…

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The news today bears witness to the Bush Justice Department and its commitment to public integrity. In Alaska, the McCain campaign turns to desperation measures to block a legislative inquiry—initiated…

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John Kenneth Galbraith wrote this in 1954, in his book The Great Crash, and it still rings true today: In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for…

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A version of this column originally ran in the Providence Journal on September 17, 2008. Sarah Palin never had much hope of getting my vote, but when she told the…

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There’s a short story in John Haskell’s collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG 2003) called “Glenn Gould in Six Parts.” The story’s ambition seems to be to look at,…

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Gemma Sieff is an assistant editor of Harper’s Magazine. The Republicans have succeeded in pitting VP against P, inverting their ticket to leave McCain, with his cadaverously stiff bearing, and…

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