“Never forget that under a totalitarian system cruelty and absurdity go hand in hand.” Ai Weiwei Florida is currently holding the poll position in the race for most notorious governance by a red state led by its nakedly ambitious Ivy League educated governor Ron DeSantis, who gleefully channels George Wallace…

My latest piece of writing at California Review of Books The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer Riverhead Books Essay by Brian Tanguay This past February marked the fiftieth anniversary of the armed standoff between…calirb.com “This book is a counternarrative to the story that has been told about us,” Treuer writes in the Prologue, “but it is something more as well: it is an attempt to confront the ways we Indians ourselves understand our place in the world. Our self-regard — the vision and versions we hold of who we are and what we mean — matters greatly.”

“I’ve watched the days pass with the slow downhill feeling we all experience sooner or later.” Javier Marias, All Souls The would-be American Caudillo is angry. Seething in the Florida night. Indicted. Criminally indicted. This is new, uncomfortable, and can’t be part of the script. It’s preposterous because he did…

“Keep pointing out the obvious.” Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature Pointing out the obvious is necessary in a time when what should be obvious is obscured in a blizzard of misinformation, falsehoods, and outright lies. It’s obvious, for example, that climate change is not only real…

“Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.” Tom Nichols, The Atlantic My mob will beat your mob. That’s the…

“The American economic system, with its excessive corporate greed and concentration of ownership and power, destroys anything that gets in its way in the pursuit of profits.” Bernie Sanders, The Nation, 3.6–13.2023 I was working at the Market, sweeping behind the deli counter, when I overheard two of my co-workers…

“History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness.” Salman Rushdie, Victory City Tucker Carlson and his employer, Fox “News” want us to forget what happened on January 6, 2021, and replace what millions of us saw with our own eyes with a fantasy. The…

My latest review for California Review of Books “The Sentence defies easy description. It’s a finely crafted polymorphous novel, part ghost story, part family drama, part redemptive tale, set in Minneapolis during the fractious spring and summer of 2020 when the pandemic raged and George Floyd was murdered by the police. But it’s also about the love of books and words and stories, and the life-altering power of reading.”

What accounts for Joe Biden’s low job approval rating? …