The New Yorker essay by Dexter Filkins on Samuel Moyn’s new book, Humane, got a lot of attention already, so I want to address only one narrow, but I think important, point: Filkins seems to me...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/the-united-states-and-its-total-wars/
The Guardian has an interview with Frank Oz, in which the main quotation of note is this one. I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me, and Sesame Street hasn’t asked me ...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/frank-oz-today/
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the National Association of Manufacturers have put together a lobbying campaign to oppose parts, at least, of the $3.5 trillion plan the...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/the-nam-and-the-reconciliation-bill/
Greg Sargent notes that the National Task Force on Election Crises has issued a report calling for updates to the Electoral Count Act.1 These include Election Timing: setting clear dates by which...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/on-fixing-the-presidential-transition/
Taking the substance of Stalin’s War aside, Serhii Plokhy’s review of Sean McMeekin’s new book is a model of academic understatement and good manners. Near the start of the review, Plokhy e...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/plokhys-review-of-stalins-war/
As Joel Silbey used to say, “its motto is not ‘the paper of record,’ it’s ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’ which implies something rather more subjective.” The New York Times r...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2021/09/13/the-new-york-times-on-floridas-new-wave-of-covid-19/
First of all, let nobody say Christopher Nolan lacks a sense of humor: for the second time, he’s kept Tom Hardy under a voice-distorting face mask for almost an entire movie. I am morally certa...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/england-expects-note-on-dunkirk/
Yesterday Dan Drezner said it was embarrassing that US Attorney General Jeff Sessions called illegal aliens “filth.” Today Drezner apologized, because while the word “filth” was in prepar...
Those of you fortunate enough to be able to pick up BBC Radio 4 on your wireless sets may wish to tune in after your lunches this week of the Trump inauguration, at 13:45 for fifteen minutes each...
Dear unhappy voters of 2016: We keep hearing you called populists and, to put it in your vernacular, you had one job and you’re doing it wrong. Like you, we were concerned about an America on �...
Below the fold you will find what I had to say about the election before the election. This excerpt comes from a paper I wrote for a conference about the Obama presidency; the papers were due Oct...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2016/11/15/on-trumps-rise/
“Paddy Power is paying out to customers who backed Hillary Clinton,” I read. Reminds me of another story about election day bets that make punters sweat. Early in the evening of November 8, 1...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/paddy-power-pays-out-on-the-presidency/
On this day, the first of February, in 1934, the New York Times carried Franklin Roosevelt’s proclamation of a new gold value for the US dollar. Previously it had been worth 25 8/10 ounces of g...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/a-gold-ish-dollar/
Hillary Clinton is taking flak today for her summary repetition of the white supremacist Dunning School of historical interpretation, which held that the attempt in the 1860s and 1870s to provide...
In the current Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal Michael W. Clune1 writes about odd small episodes, “particularly ephemeral perceptual experiences” we have that may alert us to th...
A year from today, the US will inaugurate a new president. But inauguration day has not always been thus fixed. In the early years of the Republic, habit (rather than statute) placed the date of ...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/inaugurate-when-convenient/
I dislike the term “Great Recession” to describe our times, for technical and political reasons alike. Technically, the severe recession ended in June 2009. But, as the NBER says there, In de...
Non-specific plot details discussed herein. Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight opens with a close shot of Christ’s face as he hangs on a cross; the frame widens to show us it’s a roadsid...
Peter Hitchens is less well known in the United States than his late brother, but when asked to write for the New York Times, he delivers his Mail columnist goods, full-strength. Regarding Robert...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/hitchens-minor-on-the-english-and-their-history/
The estimable Heather Cox Richardson sympathizes with George Will in his despair over Bill O’Reilly’s book, Killing Reagan. Will decries “today’s cultural pathology of self-validating veh...
https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/george-wills-serious-historical-credentials/