John Foster is a librarian, writer, and musician based in Cleveland, Ohio. When not writing or attending shows, he can usually be found cursing at his television during Arsenal matches.
The sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid once wrote, “The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” His fellow Austrian, the noted economist Joseph Schumpeter, was so fond of repeating this line that many people thought it was his. (More…)
The big news these days is the firing of FBI director James Comey. The announcement last week took everyone (including Comey himself) by surprise. Cue the hot takes from every talking head across the media spectrum. (More…)
For the last hundred and fifty years or more, scholars have been wont to claim that magic has been dissipating as a force in society. Yet at no time since the Middle Ages has the role of intangible forces and powers been so central to the social order. (More…)
Predictably, a lot of the talk these days on the American left has to do with dissecting how we came to be in such a horrible situation. With all three branches of government now firmly in the hands of the Republicans, there is a not unreasonable desire among their opponents to know how this happened and what can be done about it. (More…)
Kim Stanley Robinson is the most insightful speculative futurist writer active today. In novels like 2312, the Science in the Capital series, and The Mars Trilogy, Robinson has built his trade on looking forward at how the events and conditions of the present might play out over the course of years, decades, and centuries. (More…)
On the strength of Thursday’s news, we can reasonably assume that one of two things has happened. One possibility is that Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, decided to stage a piece of low-grade political theater in the hopes of somehow getting the Republicans ahead of a news cycle. (More…)
Perhaps the most difficult thing about trying to cope with the current state of politics in the United States is its utter ridiculousness. The ways of American politics have seldom been rejigged in such a revolutionary way, as is currently the case. (More…)
For the last couple of days, the Mexican government been playing host to the redoubtable duo of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Homeland Security chief John Kelly. They have been, it will come as no surprise, trying to pour oil on the turbulent waters of the current relationship between the United States and Mexico. (More…)
If there is one thing the Trump brand invariably conveys it is class. From this ineluctable truth it is possible to read the underlying (and heretofore secret) history of the executive order that the running dogs of the mainstream media (and practically anyone with better than a fourth-grade education) have had the temerity to dub a Muslim ban. (More…)
The dawn of the Trump Era was met with the sort of damp squib that might have suggested to a more thoughtful individual the brute realities of his situation. Habituated as he is to basking in the glow of the approbation outsized personal deference, the underwhelming crowd at his inauguration had the potential to act as a corrective (More…)
If I had a dime for every time some knowledgeable pundit has declared Marxism to be dead, well, I could spend a lot less time writing about capital and a lot more time enjoying it. The frequency of assertions of the irrelevance of Marx’s work varies directly with periods of calm in the global economy such as the so-called Great Moderation of the quarter century before 2007. (More…)
I am wont, in these days of political turmoil, to find myself lying awake in the empty hours of the night. At such times I often read and reread the columns of Lewis Lapham. This is not only because of his consummate skill as a writer of short essays, but also because his writing from the 1980s, through the early noughties, functions like a sort of core sample of American culture. (More…)