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December 7, 2019: [Uber][Political campaigns][Hyderabad (India)]
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Imperialism

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Notebook — From the February 2008 issue

The moral equivalent of empire

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By Jonathan Schell

Readings — From the January 2008 issue

Little-read book

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By developers

Weekly Review — January 23, 2007, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Chantal Clarke

Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that she will run for President in 2008, and Barack Hussein Obama released a video on the Internet announcing that he has formed a presidential exploratory committee. It was reported that Obama had concealed that he was raised as a Muslim and had attended a madrassah as a child.BBCWashington PostSeventy Iraqis died and 170 were injured when two bombs exploded at a university in Baghdad.CNNThe United Nations announced that 34,452 civilians were killed in Iraq last year, a number nearly three times higher than previous estimates by the Iraqi interior ministry.BBC“I think,” said President George W. …

Article — From the January 2007 issue

Republic or empire

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A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States

By Chalmers A. Johnson

Notebook — From the February 2006 issue

Eyes wide shut

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By Lewis H. Lapham

Weekly Review — January 17, 2006, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

Runaway Raft on the Tigris. In Baghdad at least 28 people were killed when two suicide bombers attacked the Interior Ministry.BBC NewsWalter Cronkite called for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq,CBC.comand Iraq’selectoral commission ruled that 99 percent of ballots cast on December 15, 2005, were valid.Forbes.comU.S. troops continued to be plagued by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. “They blow up,” said a Marine corporal, “and you can’t find the triggerman. You’re mad, and you just want to kill someone, and you can’t find them.”The Wall Street Journal/A1The United States bombed Pakistan. The missiles were intended to kill Al Qaeda leader …

Weekly Review — July 26, 2005, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

Lost Souls in Hell, 1875. It was hot in most of the United States. Many U.S. cities set records for high temperatures, and huge wildfires burned in the Southwest. At least twenty people, many of them homeless, died from the heat in Phoenix, Arizona.The New York TimesWashington PostConcern over storms in the Gulf of Mexico led to an increase in oil prices,Reutersand the directors of Enron gave themselves large raises.KLTVInvestigations into the expenses of former Tyco executive Dennis Kozlowski revealed that Kozlowski had once held an extravagantbachelor party for his son-in-law. “It wasn’t like a three-ring circus,” said the son-in-law’s …

Weekly Review — March 15, 2005, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

A Christian martyr. In Iraq, the director of the al-Furat hospital in Baghdad was shot dead. A roadside bomb went off in Basra, killing a policeman, and two Sudanese drivers who work with U.S. forces were taken hostage.BBC NewsA gunman opened fire on a minibus filled with people working for a Kuwaiti company, killing one and wounding three, and a garbage-truck suicide bomb killed three people and injured more than twenty.BBC NewsThirty-nine dead bodies were found west and south of Baghdad; some had been beheaded, and others had been handcuffed before they were shot. Many were members of the Iraqi …

Reviews — From the December 2004 issue

The right quagmire

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Searching history for an imperial alibi

By Greg Grandin

Weekly Review — February 10, 2004, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Roger D. Hodge

Caught in the Web, 1860. President George W. Bush, apparently worried that John Kerry was beating him in recent opinion polls, appeared on a Sunday morning talk show. Bush defended his decision to conquerIraq, and although he admitted that his stated reason for invading was false, he also suggested that weapons of mass destruction might still be found. The president said that he had total confidence in the CIA but suggested that he had been misled by incorrect intelligence. “Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons,” Bush said. “I believe it …

Readings — From the January 2004 issue

The indispensable nation

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By Régis Debray, Donovan Hohn (Translator)

Notebook — From the August 2003 issue

Yankee Doodle Dandy

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By Lewis H. Lapham

Weekly Review — July 8, 2003, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Roger D. Hodge

President George W. Bush dismissed growing complaints that he exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in the buildup to the invasion and invited Iraqis who remain loyal to Saddam Hussein to attack American troops: “There are some who feel like that if they attack us, that we may decide to leave prematurely,” he said.”My answer is: bring them on.We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”Orlando SentinelResistance to the occupation continued to escalate; in one incident, a man walked up to an American soldier who was waiting in line to buy a drink at Baghdad University, said …

Article — From the July 2003 issue

The romance of empire

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And the politics of self-love

By Thomas De Zengotita

Article — From the August 2001 issue

The American Rome

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On the theory of virtuous empire

By Lewis H. Lapham

Weekly Review — July 24, 2001, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Elizabeth Giddens

A Roman protester was shot twice in the head and killed by a 20-year-old paramilitary officer at the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy; the Land Rover in which the police were riding then backed up and ran over the body before speeding away. Three days earlier, British prime minister Tony Blair declared that people have been “far too apologetic” toward demonstrators who disrupt gatherings of world leaders, noting that “if the public knew their views, they’d disagree with them.” Hundreds of thousands of semi-naked youths were gyrating in the streets of Berlin during its eleventh annual Love Parade. Russian president …

Weekly Review — August 1, 2000, 12:00 am

Weekly Review

By Roger D. Hodge

A Concorde airplane crashed in Paris; two amateur Hungarian photographers snapped a picture of the doomed plane with flames shooting from its engines, which were manufactured by Rolls Royce, just before it destroyed a small hotel near the airport. Investigators soon narrowed their suspicions to a fuel leak, saying that previously detected cracks in another Concorde were unrelated. Atmospheric scientists discovered that some 4,000 tons of a new synthetic greenhouse gas have been released into the atmosphere; the gas, which takes 1,000 years to degrade, may be a by-product of weapons production. A Russian spacecraft docked with the International Space …

Readings — From the April 1996 issue

The flowers of empire

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By Jamaica Kincaid

Readings — From the January 1994 issue

Bosnia

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The case for empire

By David Rieff

Readings — From the November 1990 issue

Telling foreign truths

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By David Rieff

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Body Language

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Trash, Rock, Destroy

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Gimme Shelter·

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By Wes Enzinna

I.

That year, the year of the Ghost Ship fire, I lived in a shack. I’d found the place just as September’s Indian summer was giving way to a wet October. There was no plumbing or running water to wash my hands or brush my teeth before sleep. Electricity came from an extension cord that snaked through a yard of coyote mint and monkey flower and up into a hole I’d drilled in my floorboards. The structure was smaller than a cell at San Quentin—a tiny house or a huge coffin, depending on how you looked at it—four by eight and ten feet tall, so cramped it fit little but a mattress, my suit jackets and ties, a space heater, some novels, and the mason jar I peed in.

The exterior of my hermitage was washed the color of runny egg yolk. Two redwood French doors with plexiglass windows hung cockeyed from creaky hinges at the entrance, and a combination lock provided meager security against intruders. White beadboard capped the roof, its brim shading a front porch set on cinder blocks.

After living on the East Coast for eight years, I’d recently left New York City to take a job at an investigative reporting magazine in San Francisco. If it seems odd that I was a fully employed editor who lived in a thirty-two-square-foot shack, that’s precisely the point: my situation was evidence of how distorted the Bay Area housing market had become, the brutality inflicted upon the poor now trickling up to everyone but the super-rich. The problem was nationwide, although, as Californians tend to do, they’d taken this trend to an extreme. Across the state, a quarter of all apartment dwellers spent half of their incomes on rent. Nearly half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population lived in California, even while the state had the highest concentration of billionaires in the nation. In the Bay Area, including West Oakland, where my shack was located, the crisis was most acute. Tent cities had sprung up along the sidewalks, swarming with capitalism’s refugees. Telegraph, Mission, Market, Grant: every bridge and overpass had become someone’s roof.

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Perhaps the World Ends Here·

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By Julian Brave NoiseCat

Climate disaster at Wounded Knee

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Body Language·

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By Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

I am eight years old, sitting in my childhood kitchen, ready to watch one of the home videos my father has made. The videotape still exists somewhere, so somewhere she still is, that girl on the screen: hair that tangles, freckles across her nose that in time will spread across one side of her forehead. A body that can throw a baseball the way her father has shown her. A body in which bones and hormones lie in wait, ready to bloom into the wide hips her mother has given her. A body that has scars: the scars over her lungs and heart from the scalpel that saved her when she was a baby, the invisible scars left by a man who touched her when she was young. A body is a record or a body is freedom or a body is a battleground. Already, at eight, she knows it to be all three.

But somebody has slipped. The school is putting on the musical South Pacific, and there are not enough roles for the girls, and she is as tall as or taller than the boys, and so they have done what is unthinkable in this striving 1980s town, in this place where the men do the driving and the women make their mouths into perfect Os to apply lipstick in the rearview. For the musical, they have made her a boy.

No, she thinks. They have allowed her to be a boy.

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Trash, Rock, Destroy·

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By Lauren Elkin

The writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes lives in a nondescript modern building in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. I know it well: it has a Bricorama—like a French Home Depot—on the ground floor, where we sometimes had cause to shop back when we lived in the neighborhood. The people who work there seemed to hate their jobs more than most; they were often absent from the sales floor. In the elevator to Despentes’s apartment, I marvel that while I was trying to get someone to help me find bathroom grout she was right upstairs, with her partner, Tania, a Spanish tattoo artist who goes by the name La Rata, like someone out of one of Despentes’s novels.

In an email before our meeting, Despentes asked that we not do a photo shoot. “There are so many images available already,” she explained. Much had been written about her, too. A Google search yielded page after page: profiles, interviews, reviews, bits and bobs—she read from Pasolini at a concert with Béatrice Dalle; someone accused her of plagiarizing a translation; a teacher in Switzerland was fired for teaching her work. The week I met her, she appeared in the culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles in conversation with the rapper-turned-actor JoeyStarr. The woman is simply always in the news.

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The Red Dot·

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By David Means

That night at the window, looking out at the street full of snow, big flakes falling through the streetlight, I listened to what Anna was saying. She was speaking of a man named Karl. We both knew him as a casual acquaintance—thin and lanky like Ichabod Crane, with long hair—operating a restaurant down in the village whimsically called the Gist Mill, with wood paneling, a large painting of an old gristmill on a river on one wall, tin ceilings, and a row of teller cages from its previous life as a bank. Karl used to run along the river, starting at his apartment in town and turning back about two miles down the path. He had been going through the divorce—this was a couple of years ago, of course, Anna said—and was trying to run through his pain.

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Report — From the March 2003 issue

Jesus Plus Nothing

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By Jeff Sharlet

At Ivanwald, men learn to be leaders by loving their leaders. “They’re so busy loving us,” a brother once explained to me, “but who’s loving them?” We were. The brothers each paid $400 per month for room and board, but we were also the caretakers of The Cedars, cleaning its gutters, mowing its lawns, whacking weeds and blowing leaves and sanding. And we were called to serve on Tuesday mornings, when The Cedars hosted a regular prayer breakfast typically presided over by Ed Meese, the former attorney general. Each week the breakfast brought together a rotating group of ambassadors, businessmen, and American politicians. Three of Ivanwald’s brothers also attended, wearing crisp shirts starched just for the occasion; one would sit at the table while the other two poured coffee. 

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