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Once, when my parents were visiting, I broke this tacit compact on a drive to Philadelphia with my mother and her cousin Janet. Janet and her son had been in a heated email exchange about whether Israel was an apartheid state, and then, she said, his emails had simply stopped coming. “Well, and so …

Roth can reframe his alter ego's quietism as negation

Roth laughed, wrote the exegesis himself, and fed it into the shredder

History, we were told in the 1990s, was something that happened to other people. The recent past was littered with code-named police actions that, rendered pointless by the evaporation of the cold war, no longer even had the dignity of the unmentionable. Conservatives kept building monuments to the…

Both of these selectively held views rely on a fantasy that voters—that is, responsible voters, not the kind who fall prey to base desires—navigate a simple, unmediated relationship between what they like and what should be. Thus, judging by the frequency with which the argument is made, one of the…