Archive | Politics RSS feed for this section
Eyewitness to the Firing Squad

Eyewitness to the Firing Squad

As a Utah man elects to be executed in a hail of gunfire, Lawrence Schiller recalls his last talks with condemned man Gary Gilmore and what he witnessed as Gilmore chose to die by firing squad. Read the full article on The Daily Beast.

Read full storyComments Off

Considering Norman Mailer and His Work: a Letter

James Brookfield begins by reconsidering the literary merits of Barbary Shore, Norman Mailer’s second novel, is his article “Considering Norman Mailer and His Work: a Letter.” Brookfield positions his article as a response and commentary on Andras Gyorgy’s recent “The Postwar Novelist in Regression: Norman Mailer (1927-2007)” — mostly a commentary on the “socialist” Mailer. [...]

Read full storyComments Off
Still at War

Still at War

I a recent article in the Media Monitors Network, Norman Solomon asks “Why Are We Still at War?” He analyzes the pointlessness of fighting a “war on terror,” supporting his assertion with quotations by Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. He writes: It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, [...]

Read full storyComments Off

Obama Like JFK

Fred Kaplan, in his article “Forget FDR and Lincoln; Obama Is Most Like JFK” for Slate, argues that “the Kennedy-Obama parallels are, in fact, deeper than they might seem.” Within, he cites — you guessed it — Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”: In the vapid Eisenhower years, he went on, the “life of politics [...]

Read full storyComments Off

Mailer’s Almost Profile of Obama

Dwayne Raymond today recounts the time Esquire offered Norman Mailer the opportunity to travel briefly with Barack Obama. His article “When Mailer Almost Profiled Obama” appears in The Huffington Post and gives a bit of insight into how Mailer felt about our next president. Raymond writes: I said to Norman that I thought Obama might [...]

Read full storyComments