• Politics/Culture

    Four More Years: Why Bernie’s Anti-Capitalism Paves the Way for Trump

    February 21, 2020 - By 

    There was a revealing (and for Democrats, deeply foreboding) moment in Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate, quite apart from the shockingly bad, woefully unprepared, nearly moribund debut of Michael Bloomberg. It came when moderator Chuck Todd raised a question about a past Bernie Sanders statement from the fall, when he introduced a tax plan that his own economists said would reduce the fortunes of most billionaires by some two-thirds. As reported in the New York Times, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos’s fortune would shrink from $160 billion to $43 billion under Sanders’s plan. (Elizabeth Warren’s plan would allow Bezos to retain…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #12: Laura Smith’s “My Bonny”

    February 16, 2020 - By 

    “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” —From T.S. Eliot’s “The Sacred Wood” (1920) *** When writers and critics cite T.S. Eliot’s maxim above, they often stop with the deadpan funniest/cheeky part: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” It’s a great line, suggesting a mirthful larceny far at odds with the preternatural sobriety and moral seriousness of Eliot’s best-known works—“Four Quartets” and “The Wasteland” perhaps premier among them. But the maxim’s second part elaborates a valuable guidepost for how all writers and artists should approach and pay homage…

  • Odds & Ends - Politics/Culture

    Nancy Pelosi’s Loss of Form

    February 8, 2020 - By 

    Watching world-class sprinters run as fast as they do, your natural suspicion is that they are straining with every muscle, fists in balls pounding at the air, brows furrowed and veins in their neck ready to burst from the the sheer strain of racing at the 20+ miles per hour they do. But that’s not how it is at all. Instead, you see their palms completely open, brows smooth, and most improbably, cheeks bouncing back and forth against the sides of their face, all loosey goosey as the soft pliable flesh they are in their natural state. The picture is…