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Michael J. GlennonThe 4000
With ten days to go until President Trump’s inauguration, his supporters and opponents, in the United States and around the world, wait with hope or dread to see which of his promises he will deliver on. To say that ‘he’ will or will not do anything is a slightly misleading way of putting it, however. The president does not act alone, but through the hundreds of thousands of employees of the executive branch of the federal government. So who are the people who will carry out – or resist carrying out – his will? How and when are they appointed, and by whom? Who stands between Trump and us? More
FROM THE LATEST ISSUE
Diary
24 June. The day after the referendum, I spend sitting at the kitchen table correcting the proofs of Keeping On Keeping On, finishing them before going to Yorkshire in despair. I imagine this must have been what Munich was like in 1938 – half the nation rejoicing at a supposed deliverance, the other stunned by the country’s self-serving cowardice. Well, we shall see. More
Bowie
People still get into knots about the ‘mystery’ of Bowie’s serial life-swapping in the 1970s, but he’d been pulling the same trick for years on the perimeter of Tin Pan Alley before he applied it to rock. A bit of sci-fi, a bit of up-in-the-air sexuality, a bit of scarves-in-the-air sing-along, a bit of an ‘Oh no he isn’t!’ panto vibe, and a lot of power chords. More
Beryl Bainbridge
Acting came in handy. She knew how to cut a dash, draw the gaze, and deflect it. An air of vagueness – and a celebrated stuffed buffalo in the hall of her house – fed into constricted ideas about women who write books. Big brain or scatterbrain? Bainbridge had a fringe and was skinny; she looked like a chanteuse. Bingo: she was one of the dippy ones. She colluded with this. More
A General Logic of Crisis
The publication of How Will Capitalism End? comes when Wolfgang Streeck has positioned himself as the leading intellectual proponent in Germany of a Gaullist vision of Europe from the left. Now that his cards are fully on the table it is a good moment to try to answer the question: how did Streeck turn critical theory into a vehicle for the assertion of the primacy of the nation? More
