Express
SLOUCHING TIGER:
A Letter from Ireland
By Michael Heaney
This summer, civil disorder erupted in austerity-ridden Ireland. In early July, a gathering of 45,000 in one of Dublin’s most famous public spaces boiled over into mass disobedience, catching the authorities off guard.
WTF, AMERICA!
By Paul McLeanThe whole loan and interest game is rigged the world over, we discover. Then, the corporate media does its best to blackout the story, you know, the one about the biggest fraud case in history.
The Torture of Bradley Manning
By Chase MadarThe punitive confinement of Bradley Manning, far from being an obscene anomaly, has been monotonously consistent with American laws and customs.
A Life of Reflection & Invention
GORE VIDAL (1925-2012)
By Jonah Raskin
The following interview with Gore Vidal—who died on July 31, 2012, and who was a consistent thorn in the side of America’s plutocrats and their politicians—took place in 1985. That’s a long time ago, I realize, but after all these years it still seems timely.
Walden in a Wired World
By R. H. LossinIn the name of communication, we have accepted a radical enclosure of private, leisure time by the constant surveillance and increasingly commercial logic of the Internet.
Out of Africa
By Allen WilcoxTwo forms of life have come to develop eusociality, or, highly-sophisticated, complex societies: humankind and insects (ants, bees, wasps, and termites). The predominate attribute we ascribe to the surviving eusocial species must be luck: It was a long road that brought us here, with almost every conceivable obstacle to success standing in our path.
City at War
By David RosenIn Jules Dassin’s 1948 black-and-white noir classic, The Naked City, the narrator ends the film with the famous lines: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Steven Jaffe’s well-written and very informative work, New York at War, is also one of those stories.
Cheat Sheet
By Max NeumeyerImagine: How Creativity Works, the new book by Jonah Lehrer, is part of a recent tradition of popular science books, such as The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg or any Malcolm Gladwell offering, that bring the latest neuroscience to bear on the human mind.
In Defense of the Difficult
By Orli Van MourikIt happened on a mercifully temperate June afternoon out in front of the Brooklyn Heights outpost of Housing Works Thrift Shop. A willowy brunette with flowing, Botticelli-esque hair stood at a rickety folding table, a winsome expression on her face as she tried to lure in random passersby.
