The New Republic

The conservative meme of the moment on income inequality is that the middle class isn't getting screwed at all; it's doing just fine. “Don’t Believe Obama On Income Inequality,” writes Clark Judge, chairman of the conservative Pacific Research Institute, for U.S. News & World Report. READ MORE >>

Paul Krugman has a nice shoutout to my "Crankocracy" TRB on his blog and points out that crankocrats long ago seized control of conservative think tanks. This is an important point I wish I'd included. "[W]hat the money of rich cranks does," Krugman observes, "is ensure that bad ideas never go away—indeed, they can gain strength even as they fail in practice again and again." READ MORE >>

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Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980 An Initiative of The Getty Foundation I. READ MORE >>

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The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life By Harold Bloom (Yale University Press, 357 pp., $32.50) READ MORE >>

W.B. Yeats & George Yeats: The Letters Edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford University Press, 599 pp., $49.95) Words Alone: Yeats & his Inheritances By R.F. Foster (Oxford University Press, 236 pp., $29.95) READ MORE >>

You are familiar with the hypothesis that Barack Obama genetically inherited a disposition toward radical Kenyan anti-colonial thinking through his absent father. Now comes Cornel West, inevitably expressing his bitter disappointment with Obama's corporate sellout ways, explicating the opposite hypothesis: READ MORE >>

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Barack Obama believes everything that would lead us away from a confrontation with our antagonists. William J. Broad and David E. Sanger report in the New York Times that: President Obama’s plans for reducing America’s nuclear arsenal and defeating Iran’s missiles rely heavily on a new generation of antimissile defenses, which last year he called “proven and effective.” READ MORE >>