America’s woman space pioneer paid a price back on Earth.
Books
Posted inBooks
The Road to Marriage Equality: Boies and Olson’s Wedding March
What the limelight-loving legal team did and didn’t win for same-sex couples’ right to marry.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
New Film About Liberal Gadfly Gore Vidal Totally Misses the Point
Gore Vidal rejoiced in making his readers’ lives more complicated by baring the power drives underneath our political pieties. The United States of Amnesia does him, and its audience, no justice.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Is ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ Author John Green His Generation’s Pop Philosopher?
The author and phenom, with a bajillion Internet viewers, has built an avid Internet following with pep talks on how to be good. What does it mean to live like one of Green’s “Nerdfighters”?
Posted inBooks
Have Literary Prizes Lost Their Meaning? (Have They Ever Had Any?)
Cultural prizes notoriously reward the wrong works for the wrong reasons: On the long list of worthies deprived of the Nobel for literature are Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce.
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
The Brothers Koch: Family Drama and Disdain for Democracy
Lawsuits are the billionaire brothers’ weapon of choice—against each other—writes Daniel Schulman in his first-rate new bio. But buying our democracy, and maybe killing it, is pure self-interest.
Posted inBooks
The Clear-Eyed Utopianism of Ellen Willis
One of her work’s most salutary effects is its reminder that to cut yourself off from utopian impulses is to die a little.
Posted inBooks
What Piketty Leaves Out
Despite some losses to financial capital during the Great Depression, the more powerful era of equality in the U.S. began during World War II.
Posted inBooks
Too Big to Fail. Not Too Strong.
Nomi Prins’s new book traces America’s propping up of banks since the robber barons.
Posted inBooks
A Song for Gabriel García Márquez–and the Rest of Us
One Hundred Years of Solitude didn’t just crystalize who García Márquez was; it crystalized who I was.
