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I had learned about the literary magazine n+1 while I was still at the Center, having stumbled one day across a webpage so hideous I could only assume the ugliness was politically motivated. In the opening “Intellectual Situation,” the unattributed section at the beginning of the magazine, the edit…

For over a century, the United States has wielded extraordinary economic and military power. That power has shaped the world, and us. Abroad, it has often been used in ways that reveal our most undemocratic, exploitative, racist tendencies. But that we have betrayed our principles and hoarded our l…

For all his hard-bitten clarity, Baldwin expressed hope that America could see itself and could change “in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world.” He argued for what I think of as a sort of u…

Hansen argues that American prosperity and identity are based on imperialism abroad as much as on racism at home. I agree, yet I have trouble seeing how most Americans prospered from the invasion of Iraq. Instead, I wonder at how much the fraudulent freedom we export abroad resembles the version we…

“American innocence never dies,” Hansen writes in the book’s final pages. “That pain in my heart is my innocence. The only difference is that now I know it. If there was anything fully shattered during my years abroad, it was faith in my own objectivity, as a journalist or as a human being.” In the…