The Beck of Revelation

I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are. This nonresistance is what distinguishes Beck from his confreres in the conservative media establishment, who have created more sharply etched characters for themselves. Rush Limbaugh plays the loud, steamrolling uncle you avoid at Thanksgiving. Bill O’Reilly is the angry guy haranguing the bartender. Sean Hannity is the football captain in a letter sweater, asking you to repeat everything, slowly. But with Glenn Beck you never know what you’ll get. He is a perpetual work in progress, a billboard offering YOUR MESSAGE HERE.

Author: Mark Lilla
Published: Dec 9, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,397 words)

A Different Gandhi

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.

Published: Apr 2, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,253 words)

Our Universities: How Bad? How Good?

If crisis there is, it surely has something to do with the larger crisis in American society: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots, the retreat from any commitment to economic fairness, the sense that the system is rigged to benefit a tarnished elite that no longer justifies its existence. The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest. (Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—generally considered the greatest public university in the world—had their telephones removed from their offices last year, in a nicely symbolic gesture of their helplessness under the budget knife.)

Published: Mar 4, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,304 words)

The Bull on the Mountain

To my surprise there was a fence and a gate at this point, and the gate bore a still more surprising notice: BEWARE OF THE BULL! in Norwegian, and for those who might not be able to read the words, a rather droll picture of a man being tossed. I stopped, and scrutinized the picture and scratched my head. A bull? Up here? What would a bull be doing up here? I had not seen even sheep in the pastures and farms down below. Perhaps it was some sort of joke, tacked there by the villagers, or by some previous hiker with an odd sense of humor. Or perhaps there was a bull, summering amid a vast mountain pasture, subsisting on the spare grass and scrubby vegetation. Well, enough of speculation! Onward to the top!

Published: Jun 28, 1984
Length: 26 minutes (6,628 words)

The Concealed Battle to Run Russia

The Federal Security Service (FSB) is in several ways more powerful and more of a threat to individual rights than the KGB was during the Soviet era. The KGB took its orders from the Communist Party, which always kept a close watch on its operations. In contrast, although both Putin and Medvedev have influence over the FSB, it is in many respects its own master. (US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed in a secret cable, released recently by WikiLeaks, that Russia was “an oligarchy run by the security services.”)

Author: Amy Knight
Published: Dec 16, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,687 words)

On the Death Sentence

Retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens on David Garland’s “Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.” “Two years ago, quoting from an earlier opinion written by Justice White, I wrote that the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.’ Professor David Garland identifies arguably relevant purposes without expressly drawing the conclusion that I think they dictate.”

Published: Nov 29, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,038 words)

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

From 1979: Joan Didion reviews Woody Allen. “These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is.’ They have ‘interesting’ occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating. Many characters in these pictures ‘write,’ usually on tape recorders. In Manhattan, Woody Allen quits his job as a television writer and is later seen dictating an ‘idea’ for a short story, an idea which, I am afraid, is also the ‘idea’ for the picture itself: ‘People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.’ “

Published: Aug 16, 1979
Length: 7 minutes (1,937 words)

Generation Why?

How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers. Doubtless years from now I will misremember my closeness to Zuckerberg, in the same spirit that everyone in ’60s Liverpool met John Lennon.

Published: Nov 4, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,685 words)

The Myth of Charter Schools

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with “Waiting for Superman”‘s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates.

Published: Oct 18, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,420 words)

The Murderers of Mexico

How to write about Mexico’s drug war? There are only a limited number of ways that readers can be reminded of the desperate acts of human sacrifice that go on every day in this country, or of the by now calamitous statistics: the nearly 28,000 people who have been killed in drug-related battles or assassinations since President Felipe Calderón took power almost four years ago, the thousands of kidnappings, the wanton acts of rape and torture, the growing number of orphaned children.

Published: Oct 28, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,689 words)