Category: politics
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A Tainted Election? “Hamlet” and Politics
For roughly the first half of Hamlet, the audience is left in suspense as to whether or not Claudius, the present king, had in fact secretly murdered his predecessor, Prince Hamlet’s father. Then the prince devises and executes a plan to find out, and deems his suspicions confirmed; we in the audience get to be…
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Bad Shakespeare, Bad Politics: The Case of the Central Park “Julius Caesar”
1. Unlike most of those who have felt the need to express an opinion of Oskar Eustis’s production of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, I’ve actually seen it. I attended a performance during the third of the three weeks of previews that preceded its formal one-week run — a couple of…
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What might Arendt have to say about Trump?
A few people have been asking me my thoughts on the recent surge of interest in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, in relation to our present political crisis. I’m working on writing something on the subject, but meanwhile – to air some rough ideas – I offer the following snippet of a conversation I had last week…
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Arendt: “The reality in which we live”
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who…
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Hillary Clinton, Stephen Douglas, and the Logic of Success
Would liberals favoring Clinton over Sanders in 2016 have rooted for Lincoln’s opponent in 1858? My colleague Corey Robin wrote a column earlier this week on the fallacies and forgetfulness of liberal Democrats who continue to favor Hillary Clinton for the party’s Presidential nominee. At this point the liberal Democrat case for Clinton essentially comes down to the (dubious) notion…
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“Democracy” by Henry Adams
Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel, was first published anonymously in 1880. Its author never publicly acknowledged it as his work. (It goes unmentioned in Adams’s autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, published after his death in 1918). One hundred thirty-five years later, it retains its hold on readers’ imagination, a classic of U.S. political fiction. Just a few years ago, it was chosen…