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The first video game I can recall having to force myself to stop playing was Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was released in 2002. I managed to miss…

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In the absence of both urban planning and a functioning real estate market, Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge became a kind of uncontrolled laboratory for informal settlement. At the…

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In November, the Atlantic slotted [Hussman] at No. 14 on its list of 25 “Brave Thinkers.” In 2008, Editor & Publisher named him “Publisher of the Year.” His brave thought…

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< p class=”top” markdown=”1″> There is something in the accidental and arbitrary nature of amateur digital footage that seems deeply real. This accounts for its continuing power to shock. There…

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The ticking of the proverbial nuclear clock in Iran has already delivered a blow, not to the physical land of Israel, but to its spirit and moral standing. The threat…

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The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something…

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Fake art movements usually involve one really famous person and then a bunch of hangers-on. Like Josie and the Pussycats. Or Jackson Pollock and a bunch of people who drank…

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Basically, Too Big to Fail is the 24 of financial-crisis books. The world is about to blow up, and everybody is Jack Bauer. Interestingly, the only figure to emerge with…

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We must all work together to thwart PR Nazis; we must stop the identity theft killers; we must stop men from doing women’s hair The d.j. hero of “Play Misty…

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Watching Avatar, I was continually reminded of Zizek’s observation in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, that the one good thing that capitalism did was destroy Mother Earth. “There’s no…

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The movie’s denouement— the explosive ordnance disposal (E.O.D.) team responds to a massive truck bomb in the Green Zone— is so completely wrong in every respect that it borders on…

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I’m confident we will all land on our feet. And I’m certain that the experience will be an opportunity for us to find strength we didn’t know we had. I’ve…

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To read: Thomas Frank discusses Barry Lynn’s 2006 essay “Breaking the Chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart” Why do you think the S.E.C. failed to wake up to Madoff’s $65…

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The most prolific Republican poll spinner was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “The American people,” he advised, “if you average out all of the polls, are opposed to…

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The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth…

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Woke up early this morning with John McCain slapping me on the back. I was in fatigues, standing among fellow soldiers for some sort of honor guard ceremony. I leaned…

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Eventually we pile into a luxury bus and head out to the highway, where traffic is stopped so that truly important citizens can follow state and city police escorts through…

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According to the laws of my people a girl child can’t inherit, she has no right to possessions, if there is no male child in the family, sooner or later…

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End Zone isn’t really a book about football or a book about warfare or a book about football as metaphor for warfare. It isn’t even a book about the cliché…

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On Leonard Lopate: Listen to Benjamin Anastas discuss “Mammon from Heaven: The prosperity gospel in recession” (subs) from the March 2010 Harper’s Magazine. The question everyone should be asking, as…

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This sentence contains an apparent non sequitur phrased as if it follows logically from the reworded thesis of the blog post. This sentence is a wildly overgeneralized condemnation of one…

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Though Obama never submitted his own bill—which might have helped but he didn’t want to be seen losing on some of its provisions—he said again and again what he wanted…

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This is a beat without press releases, government audits or easily available facts. The budget is a secret. Congressional oversight committees meet behind closed doors in a windowless room in…

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Some readers have asked, in the context of my recent Congo columns, why I have named rape victims, including the name of a 9-year-old girl. Let me say at the…

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Ashley Ellis’s misdemeanor arrest turned into a death sentence. Her crime: “careless and negligent operation of a motor vehicle.” Less than two days after entering a Vermont prison on a…

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Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book continues [his] combat against Hegel and Marx as founding fathers of totalitarianism. But with it, [BHL] takes another step– pushing the fight deeper into philosophical history…

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Last night Harper’s Magazine held a reading at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in downtown New York City. Highlights are available on YouTube: Introduction Harper’s editor Chris Beha on what teens…

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Oddly enough, the military leaders to whom Krauthammer, Boot, and Barnes all insist that Obama should defer also eschew the V-word. McChrystal and McChrystal’s boss, Gen. David Petraeus, have repeatedly…

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